BELIEF IN GOD 



BELIEF IN GOD 

ITS ORIGIN, NATURE, AND BASIS 



BEING THE WINKLE Y LECTURES OF THE 
AND OVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
FOR THE YEAR i8go 



JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN 

Sage Professor of Philosophy in Cornell University 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1890 



COPYRIGHT, 1890, 
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



SEP a 3 1967 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

Agnosticism, or th^ Impossibility of Belief 
in God 1 

LECTUEE n. 
The Logical Character of Belief in God . 25 

LECTURE in. 

The Origin and Development of Belief in 
God . 73 

LECTURE IV. 

Belief in God as Cause or Ground of the 
World 128 

LECTURE V. 

Belief in God as realizing Purpose in the 
World 171 

LECTURE VI. 
Belief in God as Father of Spirits . . . 217 



PREFACE. 



The following lectures were delivered 
before the Andover Theological Seminary 
during the first week of March. They 
form the sixth course on the Winkley 
foundation. That endowment is ham- 
pered by no conditions whatever; a rare 
and surely a fortunate circumstance for 
any theological school. As might have 
been expected from the spirit of broad 
scholarship which animates the Andover 
faculty, the Winkley lectureship has been 
occupied by experts in different fields of 
inquiry, who have treated, each from his 
own peculiar point of view, of a consid- 
erable variety of subjects, none of which, 
however, was without some special inter- 
est for the coming religious teachers 
and workers of our age. Among the lec- 
turers have been some of our foremost 
names in theology, economics, political 
science, and even law. The themes they 

vii 



viii 



PREFACE. 



considered were largely historical or socio- 
logical, and generally of a practical bearing. 
To add to the variety, an abstract subject 
was deemed desirable for the present year. 
But for the choice of the particular subject 
selected, as of course for the treatment of 
it, I alone am responsible. While I might 
perhaps claim the sympathy of the mem- 
bers of the Andover faculty for the general 
spirit and outcome of these inquiries, it 
would be strange indeed if they accepted 
all my conclusions, or even looked at com- 
mon beliefs from the same point of view. 

No apology is needed for a fresh exam- 
ination of the character, origin, and valid- 
ity of our belief in God. Historical 
studies are just now greatly in favor. But 
no theological belief can rest on a mere 
historical occurrence. An open-eyed theol- 
ogy must have a philosophical basis. And 
its fundamental and perennial inquiry is 
into the evidence of the divine existence. 

Whoever has read deeply on this sub- 
ject must have been struck with the fact 
that so many of his own thoughts were 
already the thoughts of others. I cannot, 
therefore, say that the following reflections 
are original in any other sense than that 



PREFACE. 



ix 



they have actually been made by the 
author. I am, in fact, aware that some of 
them were derived from teachers, among 
whom I would especially mention Lotze, 
Martineau, and Pfleiderer, while others 
have been suggested by recent writers like 
Robertson Smith, Seeley, Fiske, Reville, 
and Thiele. And if it were possible to 
deduct all I owe to the unconscious instruc- 
tion received from the great thinkers of 
our race, from Plato to Hegel, the resid- 
uum of individual ownership might be 
far from flattering. I have, however, not 
been unmindful of the golden advice of 
Goethe — to acquire what has been in- 
herited in order to make it my own; 
and the result is now submitted to the 
candid judgment of the reader. From 
him I cannot expect the sympathetic con- 
sideration bestowed by my Andover au- 
dience ; but for dispassionate criticism I 
shall be equally grateful. I am conscious 
of no other desire or motive in these in- 
quiries than to discover the actual truth. 

A word of apology at the close. Though 
my subject is abstract, the treatment will, 
I hope, be found readable, if not exactly 
light or popular. I have, however, vent- 



X 



P EFFACE. 



ured upon the coinage of a descriptive 
term, which, as it is not likely to go farther, 
can do no harm, and does here really con- 
duce to precision and brevity. A theism 
based on the facts of the cosmos, or uni- 
verse, is called cosmic. To the universe we 
oppose man ; and a theism based on facts of 
human nature might very properly be called 
anthropic. A theism resting on this double 
ground I v&Manthropocosmic ; and I choose 
this combination rather than cosmoanthro- 
pic, to indicate that, while mine is a man- 
universe theism, man must not be inter- 
preted in terms of the universe, but the 
universe in terms of man ; namely, of that 
self-conscious spirituality which makes us 
selves and persons. Anthropocosmic theism 
is the doctrine of a Supreme Being, who is 
ground both of nature and of man, but 
whose essence is not natural but spiritual. 



The Brooks, 
Pine Hill in Catskills, 
September. 1890. 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



LECTURE I. 

AGNOSTICISM, OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF 
BELIEF IN GOD. 

Additions to our vocabulary are ren- 
dered constantly necessary by the growth 
of experience, the enlargement of science, 
and the multiplication of inventions. Owing 
to the predominance of material interests 
in modern civilization, most of our new 
words have come from the mint of the 
chemical and mechanical laboratory. They 
have been coined to describe the various 
elements, appliances, and processes, by the 
knowledge of which the modern Kingdom 
of Man has subjugated to its use and con- 
venience the laws and powers of nature. 
And as each piece of this verbal coinage 
bears the image and superscription of a 

1 



2 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



material object or operation, which may be 
distinctly perceived through the medium 
of one or more of the senses, it always has 
a definite circulating value, which is not 
liable to confusion with currency of any 
other denomination. 

When from the material we turn to the 
spiritual world, we cannot fail to be struck 
with the paucity of its new linguistic prod- 
ucts. We may almost say that the termi- 
nology of the mental and moral sciences 
remains to-day substantially what it was 
in the hands of our first philosophical writ- 
ers, though here and there old words have 
been impregnated with new ideas, as terms 
like force, law, development, and history 
may serve to illustrate. Though concilia- 
tory and even generous on the broad physi- 
cal road, the Cerberus of language is inex- 
orable on the narrow psychical path to the 
temple of speech. 

That this conservative rule has been 
more honored in the breach than in ob- 
servance by admittance of the new word 
" agnosticism," cannot, at the outset at 
least, be either maintained or denied. 
This, indeed, will be admitted by no one 
more readily than the agnostic himself, 



AGNOSTICISM. 



3 



whose creea or temper is to assert nothing 
without sufficient evidence. He will, how- 
ever, in this instance very properly re- 
mind us that the evidence is not far to 
seek. For the term itself is but of yester- 
day. And more than once since it came 
into being, its proud parent has recounted 
the circumstances of its birth, and vindi- 
cated, before the face of an ungrateful world, 
its right to existence. Still the natural and 
pardonable, though purely subjective, sat- 
isfaction of Professor Huxley with his lin- 
guistic creation must not lull our incredu- 
lity, or abate the suspicion — which, indeed, 
is of genuinely agnostic stamp — that the 
bantling of agnosticism is not altogether 
so satisfactory and so indispensable as its 
too partial parent represents it. 

Language being the mirror of thought, 
we might expect to find some help in ety- 
mology. From this source we learn, first, 
that the word " agnostic " is a barbarism, 
since in the Greek language, from which 
it has been imported, the privative a never 
co-existed with the termination ic ; and, 
secondly, that it is made up of two ele- 
ments indicating together a privation of 
knowledge, and so equivalent to unknow- 



4 



BELIEF IN GOB. 



ing, unknown, or unknowable. Etymolog- 
ically, therefore, agnosticism is indisting- 
uishable in meaning from nescience or ig- 
norance.^ The emphasis of the new word 
must accordingly fall upon a point outside 
the limits of its morphology. That there 
are things we do not know, or perhaps even 
cannot know, is a fact fully described by 
saying we are ignorant of them. But it is 
conceivable that a new term is needed to 
mark a new division between knowledge 
and ignorance. If so, the term should 
indicate in itself how that delimitation is to 
be made. " Agnosticism " is a redundant 
addition to our language if intended to 
indicate the fact that we are ignorant of 
some things, and an inadequate addition 
if intended to indicate what we are igno- 
rant of. If there were people who as- 
serted they knew everything, and others 
who asserted they knew nothing at all, 
the terms "gnosticism" and " agnosti- 
cism," in that case signifying knowledge 
and ignorance of the same universe of fact, 
would undoubtedly form a convenient ad- 
dition to the language of descriptive phi- 
losophy. But since men differ in opinion 
only regarding knowledge or ignorance of 



AGNOSTICISM. 







points lying between these extremes of the 
nothing and the all, it is trivial for any one 
to tell us he does not know without adding 
what in particular it is which he does not 
know. It is this I find difficult to extract 
from the various accounts that have been 
given of the origin and meaning of the 
term "agnosticism." 

It has indeed been more or less officially 
announced that " agnosticism " is not a 
creed, but a method. We have been as- 
sured that it consists merely in following 
reason as far as reason can go, and then 
confessing ignorance with regard to what 
lies beyond. But though this definition 
has vaunted itself in popular polemics, it 
is of little scientific value. For it fails to 
explain what " reason " is, and how far it 
can validly go. In fact, this definition 
merely makes " agnosticism " synonymous 
with intellectual integrity. It is that 
respect and reverence for fact which has 
been, though not actually generated, yet 
greatly developed and fostered by the 
severe methods of modern scientific inves- 
tigation. Of course it does not imply that 
we should never go beyond the deliverances 
of sense experience ; for knowledge, ordi- 



6 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



nary as well as scientific, is possible only 
when the facts of sense are grouped 
under hypotheses or theories. And, ac- 
cording to Darwin, speculations are of 
vastly more importance than observations 
for the development of the sciences. What 
is meant is, that the agnostic, in the forma- 
tion of hypotheses (the exclusion of which 
would be the death-knell of scientific 
knowledge) must not snatch at conjectures 
which not only go beyond the facts to be 
explained by them (for that is necessary), 
but which have also no probability in them- 
selves, or no ground for their support. 
The agnostic stands by evidence, and will 
never move without it. Where he is con- 
fronted by conflicting testimony, if he can- 
not strike a balance, he suspends his judg- 
ment. For example, in the attitude of many 
historians and literary critics towards the 
accounts of the early Roman State and 
the composition of the Homeric poems, we 
have what has been called " agnosticism 
in history and in literature." From a 
similar conflict of evidence many persons 
are agnostics in the field of Darwinian bi- 
ology. Agnosticism, in this sense, demands 
only the graduation of subjective convic- 



AGNOSTICISM. 



7 



tion according to the degrees of objective 
evidence. Who that reasons could repu- 
diate this principle, though there may be 
few who really carry it out ? 

Removal of prejudice, intellectual hon- 
esty, judicial temperament : these phrases 
all describe from slightly different points 
of view the conception which, as we 
have been assured, embraces " all that is 
essential to agnosticism." I am anxious to 
emphasize that the principle of this "ag- 
nostic faith," far from being peculiar to 
Professor Huxley and his intellectual con- 
geners, is a maxim universally accepted by 
the thinking portion, if not indeed by all 
sane adults, of the human family. As a 
principle, it stands on the same footing as 
the universal laws of logical thought. In 
actual practice either may be disregarded ; 
but such lapses do not form an argument 
either against the validity of the principle 
or against the universality of its acceptance. 
The substance of this agnosticism is not 
only as old as the writer who said, " Try 
all things, hold fast by that which is good," 
but as old as the first rude court of justice 
instituted by prehistoric man. It is not 
merely the " fundamental axiom of modern 



8 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



science," but the indispensable condition 
of that reflective knowledge which, long 
before the dawn of modern science, woke 
to life on the plains of Mesopotamia, along 
the banks of the Nile, and throughout the 
entire reach of the Hellenic world. 

But though all reflecting persons re- 
vere intellectual integrity, few, I suppose, 
will feel the need of a new term to de- 
scribe it, or if that coinage be allowed, see 
the propriety of the term " agnosticism." 
When Professor Huxley exhorts all men 
to become " agnostics," will his audience 
suspect, from that irrelevant designation, 
that what he requires of them is that they 
shall put away prejudice, weigh evidence 
honestly, and deal just judgments ? To be 
an agnostic is only to be honest and judicial. 
If these old-fashioned Latin descriptions are 
not sufficient, we already have in the Eng- 
lish language a term borrowed from the 
Greek which includes both ideas and which 
perfectly expresses the conception under 
consideration, — I mean the term " crit- 
ical." And as this term, which has also 
the advantage of the corresponding forms 
" critic " and " criticism," naturally suggests 
to popular thought what we have been told 



AGNOSTICISM. 



9 



is the faith whole and undefiled of those 
who call themselves " agnostics," I cannot 
but think that much misapprehension 
would have been prevented had these 
thinkers designated themselves "critics." 
However, the new word is now a part of 
our language. And the most we can do is 
to bear in mind precisely what it means. 

This is all the more necessary when we 
find those who proclaim agnosticism to be 
only a method of investigation, assuming 
that it implies certain results in theology. 
Their foremost champion has in fact as- 
serted that agnosticism is to theology what 
death is to life, a final stage in its evolu- 
tion. And with the masses this is now 
regarded as the true and only meaning 
of agnosticism. But such a tenet is char- 
acteristic rather of the partisan than of the 
critic. And it would seem to have orig- 
inated in the heat of recent discussions 
over Biblical theology. For the influx of 
German criticism into the English-speaking 
world has at the same time unsettled tradi- 
tional beliefs and distorted the judgment of 
those who had already, on other grounds, 
rejected them. These latter have failed to 
recognize that the new movement is alto- 



10 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



gether historical, not philosophical ; that 
it affects our interpretation of documents 
without affecting our views of the ultimate 
problems of thought. It is no doubt true 
that, by the sober and patient application 
of the historical and comparative method 
to all branches of human civilization, Ger- 
many has, since the time of Herder, revo- 
lutionized our views of the past history of 
mankind, and rendered largely obsolete the 
historical writings of the sixty or seventy 
generations between our own century and 
the time of Herodotus. These labors have 
of course shed light, and abundant light, 
on the writings of the Old and New Testa- 
ments. And there is perhaps scarcely a 
fact of the older record which does not 
present itself to us in a new and changed 
aspect. Yet the sudden discovery of this 
critical view of the Old Testament, which 
more than one generation of German schol- 
ars had already represented, ought not to 
have unbalanced the sobriety of agnostics. 
Least of all should noisy criticisms have 
been taken for the death-knell of theology. 
Strife and struggle are the conditions of 
life; and experience does not show that 
the theology of the past is incapable of 



AGNOSTICISM. 



11 



adjusting itself to the equitable demands 
of all modern science, physical or historical. 
Our larger conception of the literature of 
the Old Testament as no longer a medley 
of proof-texts, but the artistic expression 
in all literary forms — poetry and prose, 
history and fable and legend, proverb and 
prophecy — of the ever-deepening religious 
life and the ever-growing religious insight 
of the J ews, indicates rather the rejuvena- 
tion than the decadence of scientific the- 
ology. No doubt pious minds of certain 
strata of culture will resent this invasion 
of their conventional views. But in all 
domains ignorance is a barrier to the dif- 
fusion of scientific truth. Yet our convic- 
tion always is that truth must prevail. 
And if it prevail on the field of Biblical 
criticism, what matters it either to one's 
theoretical views of God, or to one's prac- 
tical sense of life and communion with 
Him ? Let us grant that the book of Daniel 
was composed in the Maccabaean period, 
that Ecclesiastes must be referred to an 
age long after Solomon, that Isaiah was 
written by several hands, part of it being 
of Babylonian origin, that the Pentateuch 
or Hexateuch is a composite work, and, 



12 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



though containing a Mosaic element, only 
arrived at its present form in the exilic and 
post-exilic periods, — and these, we learn 
from the high authority of Canon Cheyne, 
are "the facts generally admitted by the 
experts," radical and orthodox alike, — is 
it not still a fact that the great religious 
ideas and forces of which these works are 
the record, remain essentially what they 
were under the older views of chronology 
and authorship, even to the point of form- 
ing part of a religious development or 
revelation, that found its culminating ex- 
pression and realization in the benign mir- 
acle of history, the truth and life which 
became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth? 
And that gracious vision of divine hu- 
manity has only stood forth in distincter 
features since the critics of the New Tes- 
tament have set it more accurately against 
the background of contemporaneous life, 
thought, and history. Of course the lit- 
erature of the Christian religion must be 
subjected to the same critical study and 
examination as other ancient documents. 
Of course we shall have to distinguish in 
these records between objective fact and 
subjective seeming, between the events 



AGNOSTICISM. 



13 



they report and the contemporary moods of 
thought they reflect. And even those who 
differ most from Baur and Strauss must 
acknowledge it was a memorable achieve- 
ment in historical science when they first 
operated the critical method on the field of 
New Testament history, now nearly two 
generations ago. Through them and their 
successors we have been led, as Harnack, 
himself a leader in the movement, declares, 
to a knowledge " richer in historical points 
of view." But such increase of knowl- 
edge, though leavening traditional and his- 
torical theology, is far from fatal to all 
theology. Nor can agnosticism repudiate 
theology without deserting its one essen- 
tial principle, criticism. 

The third meaning of agnosticism, and 
the only one which deserves serious con- 
sideration, is philosophical scepticism as 
represented by Hume and Kant. This is 
no doubt the ordinary signification of the 
term on the tongues of people for whom it 
has any definite significance. And accord- 
ingly it is thus defined in the great diction- 
ary of Dr. Murray with pitiless disregard to 
that " agnostic faith whole and undefiled," 



14 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



to which alone the author of the term 
makes absolute confession. 

There is a certain propriety in the use 
of the term "agnosticism " to express down- 
right darkness and incapacity of intellect 
regarding one entire class of subjects, — 
that, namely, which has to do with an 
unseen or immaterial world. But that our 
faculties are so limited, the coinage of a 
descriptive epithet, however felicitous, by 
no means proves. 

It must be remembered that as in physi- 
cal science so also in philosophy and theol- 
ogy there has been great progress since the 
eighteenth century. Old problems have 
been recast, and old methods have been 
abandoned. The question, Is there a First 
Cause? is obsolete for a generation that 
finds God in the world, and not outside 
and apart from it. Yet it was to prove 
the existence of such an external Deity that 
theological thinkers of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries spent their greatest 
strength, as may be seen in the writings 
of Locke, Leibnitz, and Clarke. Whether 
their argumentation has been weakened 
by scepticism or not, the question of an 
immanent Divinity is left unaffected. 



AGNOSTICISM. 15 

Again, the enormous growth of mathe- 
matical science in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries imparted a character- 
istic complexion to the entire thought of 
the age. And theology and philosophy 
alike, ethics not excepted, were content 
with nothing less than an abstract demon- 
stration of all their theses from axiomatic 
first principles, more geometrico, as Spinoza 
says and conspicuously illustrates in his 
system. Following the mathematician in 
his deductive method of proof, the ontolo- 
gist followed him also in his disdain of 
facts of observation, and expected, like 
his exemplar, to acquire, solely by the 
manipulation of his own ideas, demonstra- 
tive knowledge of the real world, — nay, 
of its underlying ground and government 
as they lay prefigured in the Divine mind, 
as well as of the existence and nature of 
God himself. Whoever would familiarize 
himself with this heaven-scaling way of 
thinking must turn to the pages of the 
now obsolete Wolff. It is true of man 
in general, as Sydney Smith said of Dr. 
Whewell in particular, " Science is his 
forte, omniscience his foible." And if 
human foibles argue the limitation of our 



16 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



cognitive faculties, surely the fact that 
man is capable of correcting his foibles, as 
in the person of Kant he corrected the 
vagaries of Wolff's omniscient rationalism, 
argues still more strongly the contrary the- 
sis. At any rate the scepticism of Kant 
and Hume, directed as it was upon an 
antecedent system of thought now alto- 
gether obsolete, can have only an histori- 
cal interest for the philosophy of to-day. 
That it still holds, and must hold, absolute 
sway over our thinking is the assumption 
upon which agnosticism, in the ordinary 
sense of that term, is actually as well as 
ostensibly based. 

That the final dogma of yesterday is 
only the relative truth of to-day must be 
apparent to every believer in the evolution- 
ary education of the human race. From 
the standpoint of Hume's British contem- 
poraries, his scepticism was unanswerable. 
To them he was a monster of so hideous 
mien, because they saw in his system the 
inevitable outcome, under a remorseless 
logic, of a fundamental principle which he 
held in common with themselves. No war 
so bitter as a civil war; no hatred like 
that of lovers. Hume belonged to the 



AGNOSTICISM. 



17 



household of faith — in empiricism. It 
was this common ground that needed to 
be attacked. Aspersions on the acute and 
logical builder of the sceptical structure 
were of no avail, but to distract attention 
from the all-important point, — the charac- 
ter of the foundation. If, as the empiricist 
asserted, all our knowledge comes to us 
through the senses alone, there is no escape 
from the nescience of Hume. Sensation- 
alism is the parent of scepticism. But 
psychology since Hume has shown that 
sense-impressions alone do not constitute 
human knowledge. They must be elabo- 
rated and impregnated by thought. Much 
that enters into your perception of a page 
of print has not been contributed through 
any of your senses. It is the memorable 
achievement of Reid, the founder of the 
Scottish school of philosophy, to have in- 
sisted on the error of Hume's premises, 
and in substance the view of this shrewd 
and sober thinker has been verified, not 
only by common sense, but also in the 
psychological laboratories of contemporary 
Germany. No longer can it be said that 
because God cannot be touched, or heard, 
or seen, therefore He cannot be known ; 



18 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



for my friend is not known in that way 
either. And if from certain experiences 1 
infer the existence of a finite person, who 
will say that a similar process of reasoning, 
based on similar empirical data, is falla- 
cious because it terminates in the hypoth- 
esis of an infinite, all-embracing person- 
ality ? If the agnostic makes a distinction 
in kind between these two inferences, 
which may of course vary in degrees of 
certainty, he must explain why the one is 
valid and the other not. Mere assevera- 
tions of the necessary limitations of our 
faculties can have no place here. If to 
sustain them you fall back on Hume's 
theory of knowledge, you are confronted 
by the fact that that theory rests on a 
foundation which cannot to-day be de- 
fended. Rectify the foundation, as the 
modern science of mind requires, and what 
is to prevent its supporting a faith in the 
existence of the invisible Godhead or the 
unseen persons you suppose you actually 
see with your eyes ? 

If Hume's philosophy is a direct proof 
of our necessary ignorance of the unseen 
world, it is also an indirect or reductio ad 
ahsurdum proof of the initial premises from 



AGNOSTICISM. 



19 



which that theological scepticism was in- 
ferred. Its permanent result has been to 
modify the one-sided theory of knowledge 
from which it sprang. In this work of 
correction a prominent place must be as- 
signed to Kant, though in some respects 
Kant was merely the follower of Hume. 
And his whole system is to be regarded, 
not as a final oracle of philosophy, but a 
mere compromise between two currents of 
contemporaneous thought, on one of which 
he was carried throughout all the phases of 
his journey from the school of Wolff to the 
throne of his critical empire. That pre- 
dominant influence was rationalism, or the. 
theory that reason alone, apart from im- 
pressions of sense, can give us actual 
knowledge of the objective world. This 
theory, it will be seen, is as one-sided as 
the sensationalism of Hume, to which, of 
course, it is complementary. That Kant 
effected the union of the two cannot be 
maintained. His position is rather this: 
Since the mind does know things prior to 
sense-experience of them, the mind must 
itself be the co-creator of things ; it endows 
them with the forms of space -and time, 
with causal and other relations, all of 



20 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



which have no existence apart from the 
mind. Hence the objects we know are not 
things as they are in themselves, things re- 
flected in the unrefracting intelligence of 
a rational spirit, but things as they appear 
to us in the mind-originated forms of our 
sensuous apprehension. We cannot know 
God as He is, but only as He might appear 
to us in the picture of space and time 
which we project upon the whole material 
world. Nay, we cannot know God even 
as our own phenomenal creation ; for noth- 
ing appears to us as an object without an- 
tecedent impressions of sense. God is un- 
known and unknowable. 

But so also is the ego according to Kant. 
I have and can have no knowledge of my- 
self. I should know myself only as I ap- 
peared to myself through the self-originated 
spectacles of space and time. I know not 
God; I know not self; I know not any- 
thing else save as it appears under the 
transformation of my knowing it. 

This Humian limitation of knowledge 
finds its place in Kant's system solely to 
vindicate a rationalism that nobody to-day 
accepts, sacred as it was to the scholastic 
soul of Kant. That the mind should not 



AGNOSTICISM. 



21 



have the potency to know things without 
sense-experience of them was a thought 
Kant found intolerable. And that is the 
motive of his entire philosophy. But in 
order to save this quintessence of rational- 
ism, he was obliged to limit it to the field of 
sensible objects. We can have knowledge 
without sense-impressions, but only of ob- 
jects of which sense-impressions are obtain- 
able. God, therefore, is excluded. But 
the exclusion, I repeat, has no other mo- 
tive or ground than Kant's belief in the 
rationalistic principle, and determination 
to save it at any cost. Had this disciple 
of Wolff found a way of saving rational 
knowledge which would have spared the- 
ology and metaphysics, he would have 
been more than content; but since none 
appeared, he would save a rational knowl- 
edge of space and of nature even if it in- 
volved the surrender of everything else. 
The principle that the mind is the co- 
creator of the objects it knows accounts 
for a rational mathematics and physics. 
At the same time it negates a rational the- 
ology, since nobody wants a God of his 
own creation, like the space and spatial 
objects of the material world. 



22 



BELIEF IK GOD. 



This scepticism is obviously the result 
of historical conditions of thought, beyond 
which it is the glory of Kant himself to 
have led the reflecting intelligence of man- 
kind. The growth of the sciences of nature, 
by the application of the Newtonian method 
of hypotheses and verifications, has also 
given us new insight into the nature and 
constitution of knowledge. We see there 
is no rational or a priori knowledge of 
space or nature or anything else. All our 
cognitions are made up of perceptions of 
sense and inferences from them or hypoth- 
eses to explain them. Accordingly, Kant's 
rationalistic system is overthrown, and with 
it is broken the theological scepticism that 
perched upon its summit. 

Agnosticism, in the sense of the phil- 
osophical scepticism of Hume and Kant, 
is the product of historical conditions of 
thought that have now ceased to operate. 
In the light of contemporary philosophy, 
there is no ground for such an a priori 
agnosticism. It is a sheer dogma. And it 
is contradicted by the enunciation of it. 
For if you know that your cognitive facul- 
ties cannot go beyond the domain of objects 
apprehended by the senses, they are already 



AGNOSTICISM. 



23 



beyond that domain. Your assertion of the 
limitation of our knowledge is not itself a 
fact of seeing, smelling, touching, or any 
other form of sensuous perception. If there 
is a barrier to the onward movement of 
knowledge, it can only be a relative barrier. 
The consciousness of a limit is possible 
only to an intelligence which is capable of 
transcending the limit. The oyster knows 
nothing of its fmiteness. Man does ; and 
it is this that exalts him above the limits 
of sense. 

We have now completed our survey of 
the various meanings of agnosticism. The 
last refers to the subject of knowledge, the 
second to an object of knowledge, and the 
first to the method of knowledge. We all 
agree that for the acquisition of knowledge, 
the critical method must be followed ; no 
one but Professor Huxley would designate 
it agnosticism. This method must be ap- 
plied to the study of the Bible ; but that 
particular results regarding this particular 
object of knowledge should be designated 
agnosticism is to make terminology the 
sport of individual caprice. On the other 
hand, the dogma that the knowing sub- 
ject is limited to the apprehension of 



24 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



material objects, and can never explore 
or even report a spiritual realm, might 
without impropriety be described as ag- 
nosticism. But the designation of this 
dogma by a new term must not be taken 
for a proof of the dogma, as would 
seem hitherto to have been generally the 
case. Nor shall our just demands for proof 
be put off by a jaunty reference to Hume 
and Kant. For if these sons of thunder 
preached a philosophical scepticism, it was 
only by appealing to antiquated texts, 
which are now known to have been no 
revelation, but mere traditional and erro- 
neous reports of the genuine processes of 
human intelligence. 



LECTURE II. 



THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF BELIEF IN 
GOD. 

The result of the first lecture must not 
be overestimated. It has not been proved 
that a knowledge of God is attainable. 
Nothing of the kind has even been at- 
tempted. For our refutation of agnosti- 
cism — agnosticism, that is, in the sense of 
philosophical scepticism — was effected, if 
at all, by undermining its own citadel, in 
disproving the theses whereby Kant and 
Hume thought to restrict human knowl- 
edge to impressions of sense or, at most, 
to the world of sensible phenomena. Nor 
must this refutation be considered incom- 
plete because no account has been taken of 
the agnosticism of Sir William Hamilton 
and of his unexpected pupil, Mr. Herbert 
Spencer; for what is of weight in their 
demonstration of the limitation of our cog- 
nitive faculties goes back to the founder 

25 



26 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



of the critical philosophy or to the subtile 
sceptic who first waked him from his dog- 
matic slumber. Our aim has been to put 
agnosticism, in the person of its classic 
defendants, on trial. And the result, I 
submit, has been a failure to make good 
its one essential thesis, that human knowl- 
edge is bounded by an horizon, within 
which there can be no altar save to the un- 
known God. 

Can Ave then prove that finite man is 
adequate to a knowledge of the infinite 
Godhead? Manifestly, at the outset we 
have no right to make an antagonism be- 
tween the human mind and the Divine 
Spirit by predicating of them contradictory 
attributes. The finite and the infinite 
seem mutually exclusive. A single point 
is lost in the immensities of space. And 
yet it remains true that the vast overhang- 
ing firmament is composed of a congeries 
of actual points. And a closer examina- 
tion may hereafter show that the Infinite 
Spirit includes the finite, as the idea of an 
organism embraces within a single life a 
plurality of members and functions; in 
which case the finite and the infinite would 
be no longer contradictory, and the contrast 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 27 



they imply would convince none but the 
unthinking of the incommensurability of 
God with the capacity of the mind of man. 
For the present, however, all that can be 
demanded is that the problem shall not be 
put in terms that may prejudge the answer. 
And to the simple inquiry whether we can 
demonstrate the capacity of the human 
mind to apprehend God, the sufficient 
answer is, that we cannot prove the capa- 
city of the mind to know anything what- 
ever, and that it is only by actual trials, 
most of them failures, that mankind has 
found out what knowledge it is capable of 
compassing. We grow in knowledge, as 
in virtue, by cultivating it. The attempt 
to define the proportions of the stature 
beyond which the intellect may not expand 
has proved utterly vain. Philosophers may 
analyze the elements that enter into cogni- 
tion and describe their respective functions, 
but this gives them no a priori criterion 
for setting up, as Kant did, one sort of 
knowledge as valid and another as illu- 
sory. And if it did, they could find no 
reason for refusing to group together our 
knowledge of finite spirits and that of the 
Infinite Spirit. It may be said that expe- 



28 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



rience alone tests all our beliefs. But when 
the agnostic proclaims the limitations of 
our faculties, his voucher is not experience, 
but that precarious a priori reasoning of 
Hume and Kant which presumes to tell us, 
in advance, how knowledge must be con- 
stituted, and to brand as illusion whatever 
refuses to comply with their dogmatic 
conditions. 

The agnostic never wearies of denounc- 
ing metaphysics. Yet, probably, the most 
dogmatic of all contemporary metaphysi- 
cians is the agnostic himself. For even 
though his censure of the schools were 
well founded, it would not be hard to 
show that they never so completely desert 
the solid ground of actual experience as to 
attempt a demonstration so purely a priori 
as the agnostic's delimitation of the cogni- 
tive faculties themselves. The rationalistic 
leaven of Kant's philosophy is now most 
active where it is least suspected ; and, on 
the other hand, the critical spirit of the 
master, which can be worthily honored only 
by the practice of independent criticism, 
receives the idolatrous worship of a final 
avatar in philosophy. For, let me repeat, 
though it is now the fashion to follow Kant 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



29 



in discarding metaphysics for theories of 
knowledge, it is the emptiest of all illu- 
sions to suppose that anything but pre- 
sumptuous dogmatism can measure, in ad- 
vance of actual trial, the mind's capacity 
to know. The Critique of Pure Reason, 
as an analysis of the elements of knowl- 
edge, is of great and permanent value to 
philosophy. But as an inquiry into the 
extent and validity of knowledge — -and 
this was its primary object — it was fore- 
doomed to failure. For this problem is 
unanswerable of cognition as a whole ; and 
even in the case of particular cognitions, 
the solution, if it is to be anything more 
than a process of arbitrary exclusion or in- 
clusion, turns on the greater or less adapta- 
bility of the proposition under considera- 
tion to the rest of our knowledge. But 
Kant could not rid himself of the rational- 
istic assumption that the mind, which with 
the empiricist he supposed limited in its 
range to the world of sense, had neverthe- 
less the power of mapping out a priori its 
own limitations. In this respect the criti- 
cal philosophy has been the bane of modern 
thought, as it is the basis of agnosticism. 
For nothing but the great name of Kant 



80 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



could have kept so long from bursting that 
rationalistic conceit which, soaring above 
the solid ground of experience, inflates 
itself to the deliverance of an oracle, pro- 
claiming the fixed and everlasting boun- 
daries of the knowable world. The scepti- 
cism of the day is a common complaint. 
But timid souls may find comfort in the 
observation that current agnosticism is well 
seasoned with gnosticism, and is perhaps as 
near to omniscience as it is to nescience. 

The ancient sceptics went much further. 
The sophists, Gorgias in particular, taught 
there was no truth ; that if there were, it 
could not be known ; and that if it could 
be known, it could not be communicated. 
While the modern agnostic abides in the 
uncritical half-truth that we know only 
phenomena, Pyrrho went on to assert the 
utter subjectivity of all opinions, forbidding 
any one to say, " this is so," and allowing 
only, u this seems to me to be so." For him, 
therefore, the normal and necessary condi- 
tion of mind was suspension of judgment. 
Herein he was followed by the founder of 
the New Academy, who, however, with still 
more rigorous consistency, would not allow 
this principle of suspension of judgment to 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 31 



pass as knowledge. The view of Arcesilaus 
rather was that we know nothing save that 
we know nothing, and this is not so much 
a cognition as a feeling. It is the outcome 
of a sceptical mood, not of reason or in- 
sight. A similar result was reached by 
Carneades, who forms the culminating 
point of Academic scepticism. And the 
conviction of the impossibility of knowl- 
edge and the demand for suspense of 
judgment have established themselves as 
permanent positions in all the sceptical 
schools. 

I am not sure that the modern agnostic 
always perceives, or at any rate is anxious 
to recognize, his kinship with the more 
radical schools of ancient Athens. Men 
who find an intellectual relief in the escape 
from a difficult problem by the assurance 
that God is unknowable do not care to be 
told they know nothing at all. This is a 
shock to common sense and an outrage 

o 

upon science. For as scientific results 
obtrude themselves constantly upon our 
observation, custom makes their unques- 
tioning acceptance a property of easiness. 
And to question their validity, in this age 
of scientific culture, would be like accusing 



32 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



Manlius in sight of the Capitol. But I con- 
template no such attack. On the contrary, 
I think it may be shown that the sciences, 
by means of which the agnostic would 
undermine our belief in God, are as well 
established as those truths to which the 
ancient sceptic appealed for the destruction 
of the sciences. What I desire to empha- 
size is the community of procedure in the 
two cases, unwilling as the New Academy 
would have been to admit it. For they 
professed an unconditional denial of all 
truth. Yet they not only gave out their 
own results as true, they not only endeav- 
ored to prove them by reasonings, but they 
must have been in possession of some valid 
truth, in relation to which, as ideal, doubt 
of other assertions could first become pos- 
sible. And this is precisely the position 
of the modern agnostic. Children, on the 
other hand, believe everything. We all 
believe as much as we can. We follow 
thus the line of least resistance. This is 
why ignorant rustics, whose experience is 
narrow and whose mental activity is not 
much above the infantile range, are always 
sound in the faith. There is absolutely no 
limit to their credulity. But education 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 33 



and civilization make man critical and 
sceptical. And what each doubts is what 
is not in harmony with some circle of facts 
he has chosen as the absolute resting-place 
of his intellect. The geologist disbelieves 
the Mosaic story of creation, which for the 
pious peasant is no poem, but a literal rec- 
ord of fact. " The prejudice against the 
supernatural," of which we hear so much, 
means only that the modern belief in natu- 
ral law is casting out that prejudice for the 
supernatural or the extraordinary which 
originated in the fears, imaginations, and 
ignorance of primitive mankind. The phys- 
icist, with his faith fixed in the undulations 
of an impalpable ether, denies the objective 
reality of colors. And because the experi- 
mental method has proved so fruitful in 
science, the agnostic refuses to lift up his 
gaze above the natural world in which 
alone that method can operate. For him, 
therefore, God, if existent, is unknowable. 

As every denial, therefore, rests on the 
conviction of certain truths, it will be in- 
structive to examine the character of that 
scientific certainty which is the absolute 
standard of the modern agnostic. Now 
this standard is not the same as what is 



34 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



ordinarily called common sense. For the 
latter embraces that aggregate of the fun- 
damental beliefs of the race, of which some 
have already been transformed by science, 
while others seem altogether inaccessible 
to it. As examples, respectively, may be 
mentioned the now wavering belief in the 
objectivity of color and the still unshaken 
conviction of the existence of other reality 
than our own ideas. The validity of this 
antithesis between the contents of con- 
sciousness and a world of reality of which 
they are the reports is a question which the 
phenomenalistic scientist relegates to meta- 
physics. But in doing so he breaks with 
common sense, which is not less certain of 
this correspondence than of the truth of 
any of the scientist's first principles. I 
allude to the difference between phenom- 
enalistic science and common sense, be- 
cause the champion of popular agnosticism 
is wont to appeal indifferently to both, in 
happy ignorance of the fact that phenom- 
enalistic science knows nothing of his exis- 
tence, and that the common sense of man- 
kind which does recognize it is persuaded 
also of the existence of other beings, finite 
and infinite. 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



35 



Agnosticism and phenomenalism are 
complementary aspects of a single doc- 
trine. The agnostic emphasizes what can- 
not be known. The phenomenalist explains 
that even what we do know is, not the thing 
as it is in itself, but its appearance in our 
consciousness. The scepticism common to 
both is rooted in the assertion that scien- 
tific investigation is limited to connections 
between phenomena as objects of conscious- 
ness. But this statement must not be mis- 
interpreted, as it generally is. Certainty 
belongs to what is immediately given in 
consciousness, as, for example, a sensation 
of bitterness ; or to what is inferred or 
constructed by thought from this sense ma- 
terial. Thus the Copernican theory was 
developed by thought from a host of sense 
perceptions. And the progress of knowl- 
edge consists just in this interpretation of 
sensations, this passage from the immediate 
material of sense to the mediated inferences 
of thought. The scientist is simply doing 
over again the intellectual work of the race, 
whose interpretations of the same data of 
sense can no longer hold a place in the 
growing organism of knowledge. The 
ancient sceptic was right in his contention 



36 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



that nothing was immediately given but 
sensible impressions, and that these facts 
of consciousness have a purely subjective 
certainty. But it does not thence follow 
there is no objective certainty, — no real 
knowledge about things as they are in 
themselves. It follows only that objective 
certainty, which is not immediately given, 
must be established by the interpretative 
activity of thought. And the only real 
value of those subjective data of sense to 
which the sceptic limits his view, because 
they alone are what is momentarily given, 
is that they form a basis and a fixed point 
of departure for the objective interpreta- 
tions of the scientific intellect. After cen- 
turies of conflict between sensationalism 
and rationalism, it seems to be now pretty 
generally accepted that scientific truth is 
always the result of the elaboration by 
thought of the given materials of sense. 
The Baconian conception of the knowing 
mind, as a mirror, passively reflecting as 
it actually exists a world existing apart 
from it, cannot to-day be accepted by any 
logician of the sciences. 

Scientific truth is not, therefore, as is 
often supposed, given to us from without. 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



37 



It is we, the thinkers, who make it, by 
reflection upon the suggestive materials of 
sensation. We construct theories of these 
data, which are reconstructions of them to 
thought. These interpretations must agree 
in being accepted by all conscious minds. 
They must also agree with that accepted 
stock of interpretations which constitutes 
existing science. But they show their ob- 
jective certainty, or their basis in reality, 
most of all when they are incapable of 
being cast aside by the progressive rectifica- 
tion which knowledge is constantly under- 
going. And of all parts of our knowledge 
none so absolutely fulfils this condition, 
none, therefore, is so indubitably certain, 
as that ever-growing section which has 
found expression in laws of space and 
time, the fundamental forms of all ex- 
istence. Mathematics, pure and applied, 
satisfies most completely our criteria of 
objective certainty. 

Yet there is scientific knowledge, apart 
from the demonstrative sciences. But the 
latter, by their clearness, their convincing- 
ness, and their earlier and most marvellous 
development, have had an irresistible fasci- 
nation for our great theological reasoners. 



38 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



The conditions o their development, mean- 
time, were altogether ignored. We can 
see, however, to take only the case of 
geometry, that the possibility of its demon- 
strations, and their convincing force, arise 
from the peculiar nature of the subject of 
investigation. For space is perfectly sim- 
ple. It has only one attribute, — extension. 
Every part of it is like every other part, 
and it is capable of being represented to 
the eye in figures which correspond accu- 
rately to the conceptions we desire to de- 
termine, — circles, triangles, squares, etc. 
Geometry is a perfect science, because it 
deals with the simplest and most trans- 
parent of all objects of perception. We 
could not expect the same insight into 
material objects (stones, for example), be- 
cause they are given to us with an unknown 
number of attributes, thus being the very 
opposite of those geometrical figures which 
we construct in precise agreement with a 
carefully denned rule. The disparity is 
still greater when we ascend from chem- 
istry to the sciences of life, mind, and 
society. Here the phenomena under in- 
vestigation are infinitely complex and be- 
wildering, and experiment, which might 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 39 



bring order into even such a chaos, is all 
but impossible, because we have scarcely 
any control of the conditions. At any rate, 
a science of concrete existences cannot be 
demonstrative. Space is the most abstract 
of all our notions. God, on the other hand, 
who is the ground and source and moving 
spirit of all reality, must be the most con- 
crete object of our thought. By no possi- 
bility, therefore, can a theology or science 
of God follow the demonstrative method 
of mathematics. 

The lack of this insight into the pecu- 
liarity of mathematical knowledge led the 
great thinkers of the seventeenth century 
into serious confusion. Living in an age of 
mathematical progress, to which they them- 
selves largely contributed, they aimed at a 
demonstration of the divine existence by 
reasoning like Euclid's. Thus Locke could 
maintain that we have an intuitive knowl- 
edge of our own existence, a sensitive 
knowledge of the existence of external 
things, and a demonstrative knowledge of 
God's existence. This knowledge of God 
he considered " the most obvious truth that 
reason discovers," and its evidence not one 
whit inferior to " mathematical certainty." 



40 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



But a proof of the existence of Goa corre- 
sponding to Locke's ideal has never yet 
been given ; nor, from the nature of the 
case, can it reasonably be expected. And 
I apprehend no little harm has been done 
by attempting to make our belief in God 
more certain than it actually is. We have 
such a belief, and I hold it is legitimate ; 
but it does not belong to that kind of abso- 
lutely certain knowledge we are able to 
have of objects so simple and abstract as 
the space and numbers of mathematics. 

There is, however, another sort of knowl- 
edge. When I say " The sun will rise to- 
morrow," or " All men are mortal," I make 
an assertion resting upon invariable expe- 
rience in the past. Without any hesitation, 
you accept the proposition. At first glance 
it seems absolutely certain. Yet it is only 
a summation of past experiences. No day 
has passed without the rising of the sun. 
All men who have lived have also died. 
But how am I to know the future will re- 
semble the past? For if nature is not 
uniform, men may hereafter be born who 
shall never die. My belief that this will 
not be so rests upon an assumption of the 
invariability of natural laws. Such knowl- 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 41 



edge, which is called induction, has not the 
same absolute certainty as geometry. Yet 
it is the best we have in many of the 
sciences and over a large area of the con- 
cerns of life. 

Our belief in God is not of the nature 
of an induction. The only inductive evi- 
dence of which it is susceptible w^ould be 
the generalization that all or most men 
actually possessed it. But no one would 
say that was ground on which the belief 
might really be based. 

When we turn to the third source or 
method of knowledge, we find the province 
of which we have been in search. If our 
belief in God is to be vindicated, it can 
only be as an hypothesis in explanation of 
certain facts. This is the ordinary method 
of the scientist. Newton observes the fall 
of an apple. To explain it, he forms the 
theory of a universal mutual attraction be- 
tween bodies. The consequences of this 
theory were worked out mathematically, 
and all his calculations w^ere verified by 
observations of new facts. In many cases, 
such verification must be imperfect. But 
just in proportion as it is, is our knowledge 
removed from certainty. It may, for ex- 



42 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



ample, be reasonably conjectured that social 
conditions have much to do with vice, and 
that if poverty were eliminated, drunken- 
ness among large classes of the people 
would scarcely survive. But this hypoth- 
esis is not susceptible of direct verification. 
Again, there can be no experimental verifi- 
cation of the hypothesis of the existence 
of intense heat in the interior of the earth. 
Yet it explains so many facts that geolo- 
gists regard it as a highly probable suppo- 
sition, or, indeed, almost a certainty. To 
the same class of probable truths must be 
assigned the theory of natural selection, 
Darwin's hypothesis to account for the 
formation of species of plants and animals. 

Probability is the guide of life. And 
science, if we except the small portion 
which has a demonstrative certainty, can 
pretend to nothing higher than probability. 
But it must not be overlooked that there 
are different degrees of probability. If the 
generalizations of induction rest upon an 
assumption of the uniformity of nature, it 
is an assumption that commands our entire 
confidence. If there is still doubt about 
the existence of a luminiferous ether, the 
long procession of phenomena which the 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



43 



undulatory theory lias already explained 
forms an almost sufficient verification of it. 
Like these, our belief in God is hypotheti- 
cal. Its antiquity and universality give it 
a prerogative over the hypotheses of sci- 
ence. But, like the assurance of our own 
existence, it is not susceptible of verifica- 
tion by scientific tests. The most that 
can be claimed is, I conceive, that the be- 
lief is not absurd in itself ; that it accounts 
for facts whose existence is admitted, and 
accounts for them more satisfactorily than 
any other theory. At any rate, I am un- 
able to assign to our belief in God a higher 
certainty than that possessed by the work- 
ing hypotheses of science. And this allo- 
cation of it seems to be warranted both 
by the confessions of individual thinkers 
of different schools and by the controver- 
sies which we find in the long history of 
reflective thought. 

Nevertheless, an agnostic scientist might 
object to this assignment of our belief in 
God to the class of hypothetical truths. 
His own creed is phenomenalism, the doc- 
trine that we know only phenomena, or 
what appears to consciousness, and the laws 
governing their connections. And he might 



44 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



contend that, though hypotheses are the 
life of science, the scientist must not posit 
anything in explanation of actual phe- 
nomena which is not itself a possible phe- 
nomenon. The hypothesis of the divine 
existence is regarded as illegitimate, on 
the ground that God is not a vera causa. 
He is not a phenomenal antecedent of the 
consequent to be explained. Furthermore, 
when knowledge is thus restricted to the 
field of phenomenal sequences and co-exist- 
ences, what place is left for theology, or 
what facts are there which require us to 
postulate as their condition the existence 
of God ? And even if it were conceded 
that there were facts lying beyond the mar- 
gin of scientific explanation, can it be said 
they are accounted for by an hypothesis 
which sets up as their condition an infinite 
reality, when the phenomenalist has assured 
us that we know nothing about reality, that 
we know only phenomena and their laws. 

It may hereafter be seen that this phe- 
nomenalism is no part of science, but an 
accidental accretion rooted in a dogmatic 
metaphysics. For the present, however, 
let this phenomenalistic account of science 
be accepted. What then? It by no means 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 45 



follows there can be no further elaboration 
of the facts with whose -sequences and co- 
existences the sciences make us acquainted. 
I see not why the intellectual interests of 
the human spirit should be confined to the 
acquisition of a knowledge and control of 
phenomena. And this alone is the aim of 
science. Its sole object is to enable us to 
infer from present observations what has 
preceded them, or what will follow them, 
or what is now in unseen conjunction with 
them. To this end scarcely anything is 
needed but an accurate comparison of phe- 
nomena. At any rate, science fulfils its 
mission without having to raise a question 
regarding the true ultimate nature of those 
objects whose modes of behavior engross 
its entire attention. 

But because science has been successful 
within the limits prescribed, we are under 
no obligation to surrender all the other 
ends and interests of the intellect. Among 
these is the desire to ascertain the under- 
lying ground, the real basis, of all exist- 
ence. The human spirit is satisfied with 
nothing less than a consistent view of the 
world as a w^hole. And even the universe 
of the phenomenalist, which contains noth- 



46 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



ing but actual or possible appearances in 
consciousness, is not exhausted for the in- 
tellect which we might conceive to be ac- 
quainted with all their sequences and 
simultaneities. For it is a changing world, 
yet not a flux of becoming in which any- 
thing follows anything. Definite conse- 
quents flow from definite antecedents, as 
science both assumes and verifies. Nature, 
even for the phenomenalist, is not a chaos 
of different atoms, each appearing as one 
in the series of phenomenal occurrence 
and then vanishing forever. With such a 
procession of abolitions and originations, 
even phenomenalistic science would be an 
impossibility. But to present the spectacle 
of phenomena recurring in accordance with 
law, nature must be the subject of real 
inner connections and mutual dependen- 
cies, which nothing but absorption in the 
discovery of causal sequences could have 
induced the scientific investigator tempo- 
rarily to overlook. The plea that the real 
basis of things is inscrutable might seem a 
modest and satisfactory defence. But it 
has already been shown that it is to a cer- 
tain extent self-contradictory, asserting, as 
it does, the existence of essences and the 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 47 



relation in which they stand to the think- 
ing spirit. 

Yet the phenomenalist might readily 
acquiesce in this realistic account of his 
universe, without accepting the theory of 
a mutual connection of all existence in a 
unitary subject. Whether this hypothesis 
can be defended as a fair regressive inter- 
pretation of the facts of his world, need 
not now be further considered. For it has 
to be confessed that, even though this real 
basis of phenomena be admitted, we are 
still far from the conclusion that it is iden- 
tical with God. Nor can such identifica- 
tion be made so long as we suppose our- 
selves ignorant of the existence of spirits, 
including our own spirit. The difficulties, 
therefore, raised by the phenomenalist can- 
not, from the standpoint of his theory, be 
altogether resolved. True, he may be 
shown that he has overlooked problems 
as interesting to the thinking spirit as the 
temporal relations of phenomena. But 
even though he yielded to our argument 
that reality must be one and intercon- 
nected, he might persist in denying that 
we knew anything else about it. And if 
the ground of all phenomena cannot be 



48 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



determined as spiritual, we have, as theists, 
no further interest in it. 

Still, though the phenomenalist remains 
in possession of his field, he has not won 
any victory. For his theory is no part of 
science; it is not even the expression of 
any reasoned conviction. It is rather 
the mutiny of a hasty and uncritical tem- 
per, which lacks patience to weigh perplex- 
ing and uncertain evidence. If reasoning 
fails to dislodge the phenomenalist, neither 
was it reasoning that lodged him. And so 
long as he maintains, at least in disputa- 
tion, the dogma that can scarcely be held 
in fact, that the superficial procession of 
phenomena is exhaustive of the universe, 
or at any rate of what is knowable in it, so 
long will he denounce as illusion our hypo- 
thesis of the existence of God. But in 
this condemnation it must be remembered 
(though the agnostic constantly forgets it) 
that our belief in every reality, even in 
our own, shares the same fate as our belief 
in the existence of God. It is not merely 
metaphysical and theological entities that 
are despatched into the limbo of vanity. 
Thither are consigned also all other exist- 
ences, sensible and spiritual alike < For 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 49 

the phenomenalist the only meaning of Be- 
ing is, appearing in consciousness. 

It is some relief to recall that this all- 
corroding scepticism, which is fatal to our 
hypothesis of the divine existence solely 
because it repudiates every extra-mental 
reality, is not the outcome of science, but 
of a one-sided and erroneous theory of 
knowledge. No doubt it is often pro- 
claimed by our men of science, but they 
have learned it, not from the book of na- 
ture, but from the Logic of John Stuart 
Mill. That work first revealed to them 
the methods they were blindly following 
in inductive research. But its invaluable 
logical results were infused with the spirit 
of that extreme empiricism which teaches 
that the only organ of knowledge is sense 
and the only object of knowledge sense- 
affections. Its enormous influence with 
men of science has ensured the propaga- 
tion both of its vital truths and its fatal 
errors. To it, more than to any other 
source, we owe that phenomenalism which 
is now so widely diffused in scientific cir- 
cles that remain closed to the influence of 
Kant. 

In a certain sense, of course, all knowl- 



50 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



edge is subjective ; it is an act of our con- 
sciousness. Such subjectivity belongs to 
the very idea of knowing. Objects must 
be perceived by the mind, and that not as 
they are if it does not perceive them, but 
as they are if it does perceive them. But 
this subjectivity of the process of knowl- 
edge does not disprove the objective signif- 
icance of the content of knowledge. On 
the other hand, it must be acknowledged 
there can be no proof that our thoughts 
about things actually correspond to the 
nature of things. Yet we see no ground 
in the foregoing characteristic of knowl- 
edge to deem ourselves the victims of illu- 
sion. And were the existence of God 
once established, we should venture to 
express the conviction that He had not 
implanted in us habits of thought which 
are out of harmony with that world of 
reality of which He is the source and 
soul. 

Be that as it may, science, if we put 
aside its phenomenalistic spokesmen who 
have already too long detained us, assumes 
that everything is objectively real which 
it does not discover to have originated in 
the percipient subject. Recognizing that 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 51 

all elements of our knowledge are subjec- 
tive in the sense that they are states or 
activities of our consciousness, it distin- 
guishes between those which are purely 
subjective and those which, since they can- 
not be explained from consciousness alone, 
must be given to it from without, and have 
therefore an objective significance. Here 
science and common sense are at one in 
their opposition to phenomenalism. They 
both set out with the assumption that per- 
ceptions give us objective facts. Phenome- 
nalism, treating them as subjective, main- 
tains they cannot be connected with the 
world of reality. Supposing ourselves, 
however, actually in possession of objec- 
tive truth, it could only be by means of 
perceptions which are acts of our con- 
sciousness. At this subjectivity of the 
process of knowledge, therefore, the Scien- 
tist takes no offence. For him every per- 
ception remains objectively true till other 
perceptions, gained under ascertained con- 
ditions which guarantee their accuracy, 
fall into contradiction with it and disclose 
in it an admixture of subjective elements. 
This mutual control of our perceptions, 
along with the elimination of what is 



52 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



purely subjective in them, is brought about 
by repeated observations, under various 
conditions, of the same object. The indis- 
pensableness of such critical observation is 
a maxim of science. For experience has 
led the scientist to suspect the presence of 
subjective factors in all objective percep- 
tions, and he will call nothing pure objec- 
tive truth which has not stood the tests of 
his regulated observations. But he never 
finds his knowledge of the world dissolv- 
ing altogether into subjective elements. 
And the residuum, which must therefore 
be given to him from without, he regards, 
in agreement with common sense, as a 
record of objective fact. 

Now this procedure implies the existence 
of a world of reality apart from conscious- 
ness. It is a world of which percipient 
man is only a part, a part not wholly un- 
like other parts. But because every per- 
cipient is the centre of his own sphere of 
observations, the philosopher is constantly 
tempted by speculation to make himself the 
central or indeed the sole reality, resolving 
all other existences into his knowledge of 
them. To such phenomenalism science 
brings disenchantment. It makes man but 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 53 



an atom in an infinite orb of reality. But 
it does not deny his competency to repro- 
duce this reality in his thought. A part 
of it he already knows, more of it he is to 
know, all of it is knowable. Nor will the 
scientist have natural laws treated as other 
than records of occurrences in the actual 
world. He is an uncompromising realist. 
While the sceptic, the agnostic, and the 
phenomenalist have gone on weaving their 
tissue of argument to prove the incogniz- 
ableness of things, science has reared a 
solid fabric of objective knowledge, whose 
possibility is thus demonstrated by its pres- 
ence, and whose actuality must henceforth 
constitute the data of sound philosophy. 
This is a circumstance which in modern 
philosophy has been far too little consid- 
ered. Human knowledge is no longer the 
medley of unsifted experience, in whose 
contradictions the ancient sceptics found 
their most potent weapons of attack. The 
verified results of science, which form the 
larger part of modern knowledge, are of 
recent acquisition. And whatever our 
theory of the possibility of knowing, it 
cannot discredit truths so firmly estab- 
lished and so frequently verified. 



54 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



Hence, though the ancient scepticism 
were revived, it could not shake our con- 
viction of the objective truth of the laws 
of nature. Or rather, I should say, the 
ancient scepticism has been rendered obso- 
lete by the establishment through science 
of a large body of systematized knowledge. 
Take the ten rpoiroL or logical grounds of 
doubt, as in the last school of Greek scep- 
tics they were formulated by iEnesidemus 
and repeated by Sextus Empiricus, and you 
will find they have been answered by the 
careful experiments of modern science. 
Those variations in objects under different 
conditions, which seemed to these Greek 
thinkers impediments to knowledge, have 
become starting-points for modern investi- 
gators, whose reward has been the discov- 
ery of general laws governing the changing 
play of the objective world. Again, the 
different and even contradictory reports of 
perception do not prove it is nothing but a 
subjective process in the individual. They 
are rather a challenge, which the modern 
scientific experimenter has taken up, to 
separate the purely subjective from the 
objective factors of perception. Science, 
in making us acquainted with the laws of 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



55 



nature, must drive out the haunting doubt 
of their objective reality. Experiment 
shows that the materials of this knowledge 
are not originated by the subject. They 
are given to it from without. The relations 
we know are relations that actually obtain 
in that self -existing universe of which man 
is a part. 

I must not be understood as implying 
that modern science proves the existence 
of a universe outside human consciousness. 
It only renders doubt or disproof of such 
reality difficult and unnecessary. In a last 
analysis " this given miracle of reality," as 
Lotze describes it, is a primary, but inde- 
monstrable, datum of all intelligence. All 
knowledge is knowledge not of itself, but 
of a reality apart from itself. And this 
realism, we have seen, is presupposed in 
all science and gives meaning to scientific 
methods. Still, while science borrows from 
common sense this fundamental belief, it 
makes no inquiry into the ultimate nature 
of reality. In its quest of simplicity sci- 
ence has indeed postulated a world of 
moving atoms, by which it has been en- 
abled to explain many of the co-existences 
and sequences that constitute the object of 



56 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



its investigation. But this is only a pro- 
visional and partial hypothesis, and it is 
attended with many difficulties. While it 
satisfies our love of unity and simplicity, it 
fails to convince us that the richness and 
variety of the universe have their source 
and ground in the mere motion of such 
homogeneous elements. And whatever 
original essences be assumed, if they are a 
plurality, we shall have to ask how they 
could come together and form a single 
orderly world, and what is the exact 
nature of those actions and reactions be- 
tween them, which science dogmatically 
assumes, but which, from its own stand- 
point alone, are found to contain insoluble 
difficulties. In short, the scientific intel- 
lect, when it reflects upon itself, its method, 
its attainments, and its assumptions, is 
driven beyond itself to make a final syn- 
thesis of its knowledge, a final interpreta- 
tion of the ultimate constitution of that 
universe whose parts it has brought to the 
light of an intelligence which cannot rest 
satisfied with mere causal connections. It 
is by such a final effort we are carried, if 
at all, to the hypothesis of the existence of 
God. The grounds that may warrant that 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



57 



hypothesis will be considered hereafter. 
At present our only aim is to show the 
need of this or some similar hypothesis, in 
addition to the results of natural science, 
even though natural science had completely 
fulfilled its mission, as an answer to the 
legitimate demand of the thinking spirit 
for a connected view of the universe as a 
whole. Science is the record of causal 
relations ; but causation is only a single 
ray of that prismatic intelligence which 
needs to diffuse itself in unbroken unity 
over the whole sphere of Being. 

The nearest approach made by science 
to our hypothesis of the existence of God 
lies in the assertion of the universality of 
law. This assertion is a mere postulate 
whose validity no experience can confirm. 
Confirmatory instances in the past and of 
the known warrant no inference with re- 
gard t<> the future and the unknown, save 
on the tacit admission of the principle it- 
self, — the universality of law. What the 
supposition is based upon is the conviction 
of the unity and systematic connection of 
all reality. It is this conviction, and this 
alone, Avhich enables us to argue from one 
part of reality to another, from the past to 



58 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



the future, from the known to the un- 
known. Owing to the prevalence of phe- 
nomenalism the scientist rarely expresses 
his initial assumption in these realistic 
terms. The chemist or physician, however, 
must often have a suspicion that in ex- 
plaining phenomena he is noting their real 
mutual dependence upon one another. Yet 
if interrogated, he would probably speak 
by the card, and tell you he was only not- 
ing relations of succession and simulta- 
neity. This, however, need not hinder us 
from interpreting the universal postulate 
of science as involving the existence of a 
unitary interconnected cosmos embracing 
all reality. And when the scientific posi- 
tion is thus stated, the scientific impulse 
itself forces us to the next inquiry : How 
shall we conceive of the nature of that 
one reality in order to make intelligible its 
modes of behavior, as science has recorded 
them? This is surely a legitimate ques- 
tion. Of course it is a difficult one; but 
Ave have no more right to say it is unan- 
swerable than to say that a problem in 
physics yet unsolved is insoluble. Equally 
true is it that the question has not here 
been answered. At present my only en- 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



59 



cleaver is to justify the asking of it. 
Whether the hypothesis of the existence 
of God contains a satisfactory answer is a 
point reserved for subsequent consideration. 

The results hitherto attained will seem 
to many minds very inconsiderable. But 
the progress of sound knowledge is always 
slow. And in a matter like the present, 
it seems advisable to begin at the begin- 
ning, to set down nought in haste, and to 
extenuate nought of all the objections that 
have been brought against our undertaking. 
And though little, something has actually 
been gained in the course of our inqui- 
ries, something too of not inconsiderable 
significance. It has been seen that science 
per se is not phenomenalistic, but realistic. 
It has been seen that the indispensable 
postulate of science — the universality of 
the laws of nature — is only the expres- 
sion of a conviction of the unity and uni- 
versal inner connection of all reality. What 
the nature of this reality must be, if it is 
to render intelligible those fixed mutual de- 
pendencies of things which science reads as 
laws of causation, is a question the reflect- 
ing spirit cannot possibly forego, though 
the answer can never be more certain than 



60 



BELIEF IX GOD. 



a scientific hypothesis incapable of com- 
plete verification. As, however, the only 
reality we know from the inside is a spirit- 
ual ego, it may be premised that if the 
hypothesis of a universal spirit or w'orlcl- 
soul accounted for the fundamental as- 
sumptions of science, it would be in itself 
an admissible hypothesis, and probable just 
in proportion as we could reconcile with 
it all the remaining facts of our knowledge. 

Such an hypothesis I hope to be able to 
establish with reasonable certainty. But 
we can scarcely reckon upon the sympathy 
either of popular or of scientific thought. 
The mass of mankind refuses to associate- 
God with nature except as its distant 
creator and designer. The champions of 
the natural sciences maintain that their 
discoveries of casual connections are the 
be-all and end-all of our knowledge of 
nature. Both agree in the scholastic dic- 
tum of Sir William Hamilton : " Nature 
conceals God." And the scientist espe- 
cially is sure that the cosmos (man apart) 
presents no problem that might lead us to 
look for a divine presence. Theoretical 
thought, he tells us, if left to itself, would 
never find an occasion to step beyond the 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



61 



connections of the material world we per- 
ceive by our senses. It might recognize 
the infinitude of these relations and the 
inability of thought to compass them, but 
beyond the horizon of actual experience it 
would have no ground to assume anything 
but an unbroken series of causal connec- 
tions. This similarity of the unknown to 
the known I do not call in question. But 
I must repeat that it rests on the postulate 
of the inner systematic connection of all 
reality. And of this connection — these 
fixed mutual actions and reactions of things 
— theoretical thought is surely obliged to 
form some conception. And if so, we are 
driven by thought itself beyond the realm 
of its achievements in science to an inter- 
pretation of the nature of ultimate reality. 
It is not beyond the connections of the sen- 
sible world we expect to see God, but in 
and through them as the sole condition of 
their possibility. That our belief in God, 
therefore, must be without cosmic grounds 
cannot be conceded to the scientist. Only 
by arbitrarily limiting the operations and 
interests of intelligence to the bare fact of 
causal relations can such a dogma be main- 
tained. It is impossible to give a reason 



62 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



for this limitation; but the cause is no 
doubt found in our absorption in science, 
our adoption of scientific methods, and our 
temptation to measure the mind of man by 
what it has achieved in a conspicuous, 
though single, field of its activity. It 
seems probable, however, that in the prog- 
ress of science the human mind will return 
to a critical analysis of its scientific start- 
ing-points. And in this metaphysic of 
science what we mean when we say a 
thing exists or an event happens will have 
to be explained. Should it turn out that 
our hypothesis of the being of God is the 
only one that can render intelligible exist- 
ence and change, which the scientist is 
obliged to recognize, the result would be 
what might fairly be called a doctrine of 
cosmic theism. 

This metaphysic of nature could not, 
however, become a doctrine of cosmic the- 
ism, unless it had been shown that the ulti- 
mate ground of being and change were an 
infinite spirit. And this proof would be 
wanting so long as man, the only spiritual 
being we know, were omitted from the 
data. Consequently, while nature does not 
conceal God, it reveals him only as a meta- 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



63 



physical unity, demanding characteristics 
which would remain unintelligible to us 
but for our own experience of self-conscious 
existence. This is the humanistic, or, as 
I should prefer to call it, in contrast with 
the cosmic, the anthropic element in our 
idea of God. I might indeed have de- 
scribed it as anthropomorphic. But that 
much-abused term, as its etymology sug- 
gests, signified originally the ascription to 
God of a human form. It was this belief 
among the Greeks of the sixth century 
before Christ that excited the irony and 
aversion of Xenophanes of Colophon, the 
burden of whose complaint was that mor- 
tals believe the gods to have senses, voice, 
and body like their own, just as oxen and 
horses, if they could paint, would foolishly 
represent the gods with the bodies of horses 
and oxen. But the ascription to God of 
moral and intellectual attributes akin to the 
human was not branded as anthropomor- 
phism by the ancients, nor by the moderns 
either, until within very recent times. At 
present, however, eminent professors of the 
natural sciences, who have the ear of the 
public, have effected this extension in the 
use of the term ; and anthropomorphism 



64 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



has degenerated into a fashionable epithet 
of reproach for any theory which essays 
to form even an hypothetical conception of 
God. But the fashion of this world passeth 
away ; and despite its present frown, I see 
no alternative to our ascription of self- 
consciousness to the one ultimate reality 
whose existence science obliges us to as- 
sume. For that reality must, to say noth- 
ing more, be so constituted that it shall be 
a unity in the midst of change. And this 
condition is satisfied, so far as our knowl- 
edge extends, only by self-conscious spirit, 
of which we are immediately aware in our 
own inner experience. Our hypothesis, 
then, is a cosmic hypothesis, for its object 
is to account for facts in the objective 
world. It cannot, however, be completely 
developed, without taking account of our 
own conscious experience ; and this appeal 
to man may be called the anthropic aspect 
of the hypothesis. If, then, self-conscious- 
ness is the only admissible form under 
which the ground and essence of things 
may be represented, our ultimate interpre- 
tation of the universe is not merely a cos- 
mic, but an anthropocosmic theism. 

This hypothesis, let me repeat, I do not 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 



65 



attempt to establish here. That is a task 
to be undertaken in later lectures. At 
present I am only maintaining that the 
postulates of science warrant and demand 
some interpretation of ultimate reality, and 
that anthropocosmic theism satisfies at least 
the formal requirements of a scientific hy- 
pothesis. To make this clear, I have inci- 
dentally given hints of the subsequent argu- 
ment, which is to show that our hypothesis 
is a tenable one in view of all the facts. 
It will not surprise me if these hints are 
deemed inadequate. But the proof of a 
position ought not to be expected in a pre- 
liminary statement and vindication of it. 

To some it may seem strange that I 
dwell upon the mere possibility of a scien- 
tific hypothesis of the existence of God. 
But the fact is that this possibility is gen- 
erally denied by the spokesmen of modern 
science. Repudiating the ideas of creation 
and design, they find no objective basis 
for our belief in God, no facts in nature 
requiring such an hypothesis. We have 
endeavored, on the other hand, to show 
that science draws its life from an assump- 
tion regarding the nature of reality, which 
needs only elucidation to lead scientifically 



66 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



to the hypothesis of the divine existence. 
Such an hypothesis, therefore, would de- 
serve the name of knowledge, though not 
ranking among demonstrative truths. But 
the whole spirit of modern science is to- 
wards the extrusion of every theistic in- 
terpretation of the world from the domain 
of scientific knowledge. It is supposed 
that the only vouchers for the existence 
of God, if indeed there are any, are to be 
found in ourselves, — in our ethical postu- 
lates. The idea of God is not required, we 
are told, for the interpretation of the uni- 
verse, but only for the satisfaction of the 
demands of our moral nature. Without it 
there would be moral paralysis in the life 
of man. Here you have a form of anthropic 
theism that may be called ethical theism. It 
is not of the nature of a scientific hypothe- 
sis. It is a mere subjective faith, based 
on the conviction of the moral vocation and 
destiny of man. But this ethical theism 
lacks the solid basis of cosmic facts. And 
it will remain a mere postulate, without 
scientific foundation, until the discovery 
is made that, if we look steadily into the 
face, or, at any rate, into the heart of the 
universe, we can escape permanent intel- 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 67 

lectual confusion only by that hypothesis 
of a world-spirit, which I have ventured 
to christen anthropocosmic theism. 

The moral evidence for the existence of 
God, taken by itself, is inadequate. As 
part of a cumulative argument, it is, no 
doubt, of very great weight. But if no 
God can be found in the universe, there 
will always be a temptation to dilute mo- 
rality to the consistency of this cosmic 
atheism. It is easier to relax the high 
sense of duty to expediency than to main- 
tain it at a tension which nothing but faith 
in God can keep from snapping. Ethical 
theism cannot long sustain itself beside 
cosmic atheism. It is, therefore, a matter 
of great moment to understand how they 
ever came to be put together. Were it 
true that nature conceals God while man 
reveals Him, this combination of cosmic 
atheism and anthropic theism would not 
surprise us. But this is not the fact, as 
we have already shown. On the other 
hand, a close examination of our belief 
in God reveals characteristics which must 
always render it an object of some suspi- 
cion to men of science. They accept truths 
as objective only when all subjective fac- 



68 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



tors have been eliminated from them. Sci- 
entific truth is absolutely disinterested. It 
reports the facts of the world as they are, 
without any concern for the hopes and fears 
and yearnings of the scientist himself. Now 
we are all deeply interested in the momen- 
tous question of the existence of God. It 
is big with our own destiny, with the mys- 
teries of the whence, the what, and the 
whither of every human soul. With pro- 
tracted thinking of God, the flood-gates of 
the heart are opened, and all the springs 
of life are thrown into commotion. Now 
it may be urged, and not without appear- 
ance of reason, that an hypothesis of the 
existence of a Being with whom our own 
life is so commingled, cannot have the dis- 
interestedness, the pure objectivity, which 
the scientist demands of every cosmic hy- 
pothesis. Is, then, anthropocosmic theism 
after all an illegitimate hypothesis ? Does 
our belief in God resolve itself into mere 
vivacious feelings, as, according to Hume, 
is the case with our belief in all existence, 
that of self and nature as well as that of 
God? 

One thing is certain. Those objective 
facts in explanation of which we framed 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 69 



our hypothesis remain precisely what they 
are, whatever be our psychological account 
of the grounds and motives of belief. That 
being premised, I readily admit the influ- 
ence of wishes, desires, and feelings, espe- 
cially hope and fear, upon human belief. 
It is a popular saying that men believe 
what they want to believe: "the wish is 
father to the thought." And the mental 
life of the race, as of every new individual 
born into it, begins with absolute credulity. 
But this intellectual gluttony soon pro- 
duces dyspepsia, and many of the former 
relishes must be abandoned. New beliefs 
conflict with old, and stable equilibrium is 
restored only by elimination of the less 
favored. In this struggle for existence, 
the beliefs that survive may first of all be 
those that stimulate the feelings and the 
will, but in the long run they are those 
that accord best with the objective facts. 
Even among the lower animals this is nec- 
essary, for otherwise that intelligence by 
means of which they have escaped destruc- 
tion could not have been a guide to action. 
And this predominance of objective beliefs 
over subjective interests is what intellec- 
tual education aims to effect. The man 



70 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



who can maintain his intellectual centre of 
gravity in the presence of highly exciting 
and stingingly interesting objects of belief 
is, at least according to the standard of 
science, the man of ideal education. 

Now what I maintain is, that in the long 
education of the human race, at least its 
most favored members have outgrown the 
influence of those fancies, illusions, and 
hallucinations which distort the intellec- 
tual vision of infancy. And though those 
liars — hopes and fears — are still with us, 
we know they are liars, and stand upon 
our guard. An illusion recognized is no 
illusion. Now the proof that intellectual 
judgments are independent of our own 
wishes, is the existence of that great body 
of objective knowledge which we call the 
sciences. To a greater or less degree, as- 
tronomy, chemistry, biology, and all the 
sciences originated in practical interests. 
The history of their growth is the history 
of the triumph of rational belief over the 
seductions of alchemy, astrology, witch- 
craft, and the whole horde of subjective 
illusions. Hopes and fears are strong, but 
stronger still in the modern man is the love 
of truth. And so I conclude that, though 



ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 71 

the hypothesis of the existence of God is 
one in which we have a deep and moving 
interest, our minds have been so trained 
and poised by thought, that we can esti- 
mate the evidence of this hypothesis with 
the same disinterestedness and objectivity 
of attitude that we bring to the examina- 
tion of any other wide cosmic hypothesis. 
Of course we shall need to be on the alert 
against the influence of feelings. But that 
is no peculiarity of the present inquiry. 

The general conclusion is that anthropo- 
cosmic theism, though not yet established 
as absolutely satisfactory and tenable, must 
nevertheless be admitted to be a possible 
and even legitimate hypothesis for the in- 
terpretation of the ultimate facts of exist- 
ence. The next step would be to confirm 
this hypothesis by proof, or rather to adduce 
the grounds on which its validity may be 
maintained. The genius of history, how- 
ever, must not be outraged. And before 
advancing new arguments in favor of an- 
thropocosmic theism, I cannot forego an 
examination of the historical phases of 
man's belief in God, with a view to dis- 
covering the essence of their content and 
the goal of their development. If it should 



72 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



be found, as I am persuaded is the fact, that 
the human mind begins with a vague, natu- 
ralistic-humanistic conception of the gods 
(a conception whose elements are not yet 
differentiated, much less opposed), and that 
reflection, after developing this latent con- 
trast in the opposite directions of naturism 
and animism, rises everywhere with the 
progress of civilization to a synthesis of 
both nature and man in one eternal and 
spiritual ground, the history of the develop- 
ment of the religious consciousness would 
be itself an argument in favor of that 
hypothesis which we here seek to estab- 
lish. That anthropocosmic theism is the 
goal of man's growing consciousness of 
God, — and as goal also its final cause and 
essential content at every stage of devel- 
opment, — must be left to the following 
lecture to show, from a survey of the facts 
of religious history. 



LECTURE IIL 



THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF 
BELIEF IN GOD. 

Space is the form of the material uni- 
verse. But all that is, physical and psychi- 
cal alike, exists in time, and in time has 
come to be what it now is. To understand 
the nature of things, therefore, we must 
see, not only the completed result, but the 
entire succession of phases of which it is 
the final outcome. This is the justification 
of that historical method which has been so 
fruitfully applied to the sciences during the 
present century, transforming them, from 
a miscellany of superficial observations, 
into a progressive and systematic record 
of the ever-unfolding drama of the world. 
Evolutionary science is the name ordina- 
rily given to this new historical knowledge 
of nature. But the same method has been 
carried into our study of man — the prov- 
ince of history in its narrower sense. And 

73 



74 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



we bind together all our knowledge of 
human thinking, doing, and suffering, by 
this modern conception of gradual develop- 
ment. So far, indeed, has this excellent 
method been pushed that some philoso- 
phers have supposed themselves to be de- 
scribing the nature of things when they 
were only enumerating the circumstances 
that favored the development of them. 
And it has been widely assumed that cer- 
tain beliefs lost their validity when once 
the history of their origin and growth had 
been discovered. 

But the faults arising from the misin- 
terpretation of a principle are not to be 
charged to the principle itself. Whatever 
erroneous inferences have been drawn by 
this or that evolutionist, the soundness of 
the evolutionary method remains intact. 
That method is based on the fact that all 
existences, all objects of thought or in- 
quiry, are in a state of becoming. And 
this process is a series of changes in time. 
The evolutionary or historical method, 
therefore, makes science a reproduction in 
thought of the successive phases of object- 
ive reality. And this is absolutely neces- 
sary for our knowledge, since the full 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 75 



nature of any reality reveals itself only 
in the totality of its development. This 
is a point too little noticed by current evo- 
lutionism, which exhausts itself in discov- 
ering the changing phases of developing 
reality with scarce an attempt to effect a 
synthesis of their essential content. Such 
one-sidedness is a prolific source of scepti- 
cism, especially in morals and religion. 
One historical variety is confronted by an- 
other, as though both were not differentia- 
tions of some common species. Polytheism, 
monotheism, and pantheism are supposed 
to cancel one another, leaving the enlight- 
ened mind with no belief in God. For 
the correction of such an hasty inference, it 
needs only to be observed that two func- 
tions are required in all knowledge, — the 
perception of difference, and the percep- 
tion of likeness, and that one. is not more 
indispensable than the other. However 
valuable the discriminations of the evolu- 
tionary historian, they yield no knowledge 
till fused together by the complementary 
function of assimilation. Identity in dif- 
ference is the characteristic both of being 
and of thought. 

We may, therefore, expect to be in- 



76 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



structed by a survey of the historical vari- 
eties of man's belief in God. But we 
cannot be content with the mere juxtapo- 
sition of them. We must understand their 
connections and the principle of their 
growth. In a word, we are in quest, not 
of a morphological classification of man's 
belief in God, but of a real history of its 
growth and development. Now we are as- 
sured by our most trustworthy historians 
of religion, that no tribe or nation has yet 
been met with destitute of belief in any 
higher beings. As this aspect of religion 
seems a universal phenomenon of humanity, 
it might also be assumed to be as old as the 
human race. But so far backward we cer- 
tainly cannot follow it. Our data do not 
carry us far beyond the millenniums of re- 
corded history. It would be interesting to 
know whether man had any idea of God in 
that long prehistoric period, when a thou- 
sand years were but as a day, during which 
took place the distribution of mankind over 
the earth, the formation of races, and the 
development of speech and languages ; but 
of this incalculable aeon of savagery and 
barbarism every trace has perished, and the 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 77 

memorials of the later prehistoric ages are 
confined to rude tools and weapons. 

For the epoch to which they belong, 
however, the material arts may be taken 
as a fair index to the general culture. The 
archaeologist can read the mental status 
of races from the character of their celts, 
hatchets, awls, and other implements, or 
from such arts as cooking, pottery, and 
weaving. From this connection between 
the material and the mental elements of 
culture, we are able to infer with high 
probability that the religions of mankind 
prior to the beginning of civilization could 
not have been higher than the religions of 
the lowest existing savages. If such un- 
promising germs have given birth to the 
great religions of the world, in the out- 
lying regions of savagery their develop- 
ment has been arrested. Not, of course, 
# that even there the original features of 
religion have been preserved altogether un- 
impaired. But we may be sure the changes 
have not been great, since the intellectual 
condition has remained unchanged. This 
is confirmed by the fact that higher relig- 
ions abound in elements of the savage 
creed, which can only be regarded as sur- 



78 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



vivals and revivals ; and that these ele- 
ments are the more apparent, as they have 
been the more influential, the farther one 
retraces the history of religions. While, 
therefore, primitive religion is not to be 
identified with any existing creed, its men- 
tal type, at least, must be looked for in the 
poly deemonis tic beliefs of savages. 

This theory of the gradual development 
of man's consciousness of God is still often 
opposed by the dogma of a primitive reve- 
lation. In one sense it is quite true that 
God has revealed himself to man. For, as 
we are all partakers of the divine life, it 
can only be the spirit of God that gives 
us understanding. But from this com- 
munity of the human and divine essence 
must be derived also all our intellectual 
and moral capacities. A primitive revela- 
tion of God, therefore, could only mean 
that God had endowed man with the ca- 
pacity of apprehending his divine original. 
This capacity, like every other, is innate, 
and like every other it realizes itself only 
in the presence of appropriate conditions. 
The infant knows nothing, but through 
experience and reflection it is capable of 
knowing everything. To say, therefore, 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 79 

man has had a divine revelation is tanta- 
mount to saying he is so constituted that, 
on reaching a certain stage of development 
and traversing a certain field of experience, 
he must arrive at a consciousness of God. 
And everything we know of the psychol- 
ogy of children and of primitive races 
favors the supposition that the first form 
of this consciousness expressed itself in the 
worship of natural objects conceived as 
superhuman persons influencing human 
destiny. 

This view of revelation is perfectly com- 
patible with that evolutionary treatment 
of religion which is demanded by the facts 
of archaeology and history, and (it may be 
added) of philology and mythology too. 
But so much cannot be said for the dog- 
matic form in which the hypothesis of a 
primitive revelation has crystallized in the 
popular consciousness. Here God is rep- 
resented as making a special supernatural 
communication of religious truth to certain 
favored individuals. The idea of God is 
brought to man from without, by means of 
a miraculous revelation. As, however, this 
pure and true idea of God is not to be found 
among any of the varieties of early history, 



80 



BELIEF IN GOB. 



it is conjectured that it was lost almost as 
soon as it was gained by the fall of primi- 
tive man from his high estate of sin- 
lessness. This solution of the theistic 
problem is beset by invincible difficulties. 
I pass over the unscientific character of 
the hypothesis and its dependence upon 
arbitrary assumption. I shall not under- 
take to inquire whether the narration in 
the book of Genesis, which is supposed to 
contain the primitive revelation, makes any 
such claim; and whether, even if it does, 
Biblical criticism has not refuted its preten- 
sion by showing that the record is no history 
of the actual beginning of things, but only 
a reproduction of current traditions regard- 
ing that beginning. I confine myself to a 
single issue, namely, the psychological 
possibility of such a primitive revelation ; 
and I hold it is quite inconceivable. The 
theory arose when men knew little of an- 
tiquity, when the golden age of mankind 
was still believed to lie at the beginning. 
There was no more scruple about assigning 
elevated ideas to primitive man than there 
was in accepting the belief of his inter- 
course with the Creator. But modern 
discoveries have changed all that. We 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 



81 



now know that our earliest ancestors lived 
a life of cruel hardships, of constant strug- 
gles, and of unimaginable savagery, gross- 
ness, and ignorance. And the farther we 
can follow man back through that stony 
age, the nearer is he seen to approach the 
condition of the animal. Now, how could 
such an one apprehend any of the sublime 
truths of spiritual religion, even if a teacher 
were there to give him the instruction? 
Learning is a process of interpreting the 
unknown by what is already known. And 
the knowledge of primitive man, who was 
engaged in an absorbing struggle for life, 
whose experience scarcely got beyond ob- 
jects of food, shelter, and defence, whose 
very language denoted only sensible things 
and events, did not contain the elements 
necessary for an assimilation of the doc- 
trine of the existence of one infinite spirit, 
even though one imagined it poured into 
all the avenues of his intelligence by an 
external revealer. No, the teacher is 1101 
a pump ; the pupil is not a tub. And the 
necessity of a human faculty of compre- 
hension cannot be dispensed with even 
when the Eternal Wisdom condescends to 
instruction. The influence of mind on 



82 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



mind is never mechanical. There is always 
self-active co-operation. Even 

" A jest's prosperity lies in the ear 
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue 
Of him that makes it." 

And on this principle no primitive savage, 
no innocent Adam still merged in the life 
of nature and of sense, could ever con- 
struct in thought the doctrine of God as 
one infinite spirit, even though we suppose 
it communicated ab extra. It follows, 
therefore, that this idea is the natural 
product of man's own mental activities in 
the gradual course of their development. 

For an interpretation of the early re- 
ligious history of mankind, which has first 
been seriously studied in recent years, we 
should look in vain to the unhistpric ra- 
tionalism of the eighteenth century. In 
the article on Religion in the Dictionnaire 
Philosophique, Voltaire makes monotheism 
the primitive religion, and supposes the 
sages of antiquity were deists like himself. 
Yet he makes a suggestion of profound 
truth and insight when he likens the men- 
tal attitude of man in the infancy of the 
race to the mental attitude of our children. 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 



83 



Embryologists tell us that the foetus in its 
development passes through all the stages 
of animal existence, thus reproducing in 
miniature the evolutionary history of the 
species. That its mental life after birth 
should also reflect the mental life of the 
infancy of mankind is a corollary that 
equally demands acceptance. But we are 
not dependent upon a priori reasoning for 
our knowledge of primitive modes of 
thought. They are preserved for us by 
savages, whose arts show them to be on 
the same mental plane as primitive man- 
kind; that is, the earliest men of whom 
anything is known. Now observation of 
savage races reveals to us characteristics 
of thought which we find also in our chil- 
dren. The most striking feature perhaps 
is the unrestrained tendency to personify 
natural objects. The lowest savage en- 
dows everything with a life like his own, 
though often on a larger, or even on a 
smaller scale. For him nature is a com- 
plex of beings, each of which is animated 
by desires, passions, and affections. His 
attitude towards them is that of a little 
girl towards her dolls and toys which she 
knows to be friendly companions, or 



84 



BELIEF IJST GOD. 



towards new and strange objects before 
which she hesitates or from which she 
starts back in alarm. A consequence of 
this personification is the obliteration of 
sharp distinctions between one kind and 
another, as well as between things of the 
same kind. Science having resolved the 
universe into a multiplicity of kinds and 
individuals, it is the aim of modern philos- 
ophy to make a synthesis of them under a 
monistic conception of all existence. But 
primitive man, like the little child, ignores 
our distinctions between the animate and 
the inanimate kingdoms, between plants 
and animals, and between man and beast. 
The growth of knowledge has consisted in 
a progress from the vague to the definite ; 
and with early mankind the world was 
as yet undefined and shadowy, a manifold 
blur of indeterminate personalities, all akin 
because all like himself. This crude phi- 
losophy of nature was also the theology of 
primitive savages. And it lives on in the 
lower strata of civilization, where, though 
the prevailing conception of the Godhead 
is anthropomorphic, the list of gods is 
drawn from all quarters of the organic 
and inorganic world, including at once 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 85 

animals and trees, sun, moon, and stars, 
the earth, or even the stones upon its sur- 
face. Men, animals, plants, and natural 
objects form to the personifying imagina- 
tion of primitive mankind a unitary kin- 
dred, any member of which might be 
represented as a god without prejudice to 
the others. And whether it was a personi- 
fied tree or stone that was so represented, 
it enjoyed the same rights in the matter of 
ritual, and exercised the same influence 
and effects upon its worshippers, as a god 
of human or superhuman embodiment. 

It will be a matter for future investiga- 
tion, if any, to determine the accidents or 
caprices, as we call them, that led to the 
deification of certain objects and not of 
others. That among many races the sun 
or the sky should have enjoyed this pre- 
eminence is intelligible enough, and the 
deification of domesticated animals may 
perhaps be explained by their familiar in- 
tercourse with uncivilized man ; but the 
larger number of the objects of early wor- 
ship do not carry on their face the obvious 
reasons of their exaltation. Some external 
relation to the first worshippers may always 
be conjectured. But such casualties can- 



86 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



not, at present at least, be ascertained. 
On the other hand, there are certain psj^- 
chological conditions which every object 
of worship must fulfil ; and, failing these, 
no natural being, even though personified, 
could ever be transmuted into a god. First 
of all, the worshipper must be in some way 
dependent upon it. It must be, or seem 
to him to be, superior to himself. When 
stones, which were once worshipped as 
mighty giants, came to be regarded as 
things, worship of them ceased; for with 
growing control of natural objects, man 
instinctively felt they were lower than 
himself. An object of worship must be 
capable of arousing a sense of dependence 
and inferiority. From the perception of 
this fundamental relation may arise two 
other feelings, both of which, though in 
degrees varying to the vanishing-point, 
must be produced by every object wor- 
shipped as a god. One of these, according 
to its shades, we name fear, awe, or terror ; 
and its presence in the religious sentiment 
is the truth of the words of Statius : Pri- 
mus in orbe deos fecit timor. But fear 
alone would have been inadequate. And 
we know that nature, and even the very 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 87 



same natural objects, which at one time 
terrify the savage and the child, at another 
time fill them with delight. If primitive 
man was scared to his cave by the gathering 
clouds and the rattling thunder, he felt 
himself strongly attracted by the kindly 
sun, which rolled majestically across the 
unsullied azure. Or, in sublunary regions, 
the rock over which he one day stumbles 
becomes at another time the hiding-place 
from which he takes his prey. If he then 
dreaded it as a superior evil being, he now 
delights in it as helpful and beneficent. 
Thus of necessity his gods are objects both 
of his terror and of his confidence, either 
separately, or, as experience widened, of 
both together. Nor is there any incom- 
patibility in this union of fear and love 
of the same object. For when terrible 
phenomena do not actually harm us, we 
delight in their presence, as tragedy cer- 
tainly demonstrates. Accordingly fear or 
awe will not prevent man's yearning for 
communion or fellowship with those supe- 
rior beings towards which joy, admiration, 
or affection attracts him. And in this com- 
munion with the powers that govern his 
destiny, we have another characteristic of 



88 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



the earliest as of the latest faith in God. 
An actual proof of the solidarity of the 
life of gods and men is found in the insti- 
tution of sacrifice, which shallow rational- 
ism has treated as a bribe offered by selfish 
worshippers to selfish gods, but which his- 
torical investigations prove to have been 
a common meal of man and gods, the 
expression and the seal of a community of 
feeling, purpose, and existence. And just 
in so far as this relationship of the deity 
to his worshippers is vividly realized, do 
nature religions take on an ethical char- 
acter. The superhuman kinsman invests 
with religious sanctions the social customs 
and institutions of the kindred group of 
worshippers. 

Still it is probable that the earliest re- 
ligions were neither directly moral nor 
immoral, — they were simply non-moral; 
and the sentiment of dependence upon the 
gods and communion with them presup- 
poses a considerable evolution of intelli- 
gence. So that there is nothing unlikely 
in the assumption that the palseontological 
races either had no religion, or apprehended 
only in dim, fugitive outline the elements 
out of which religion was afterwards to 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 



89 



grow. But when men did arrive at a sta- 
ble consciousness of the gods, we cannot 
but hold, from what we know of the facts 
of religious history and the operations of 
undeveloped intelligence as seen in chil- 
dren and savages, that these gods were per- 
sonifications of natural objects, conceived 
as superior to men, and to some extent, at 
least, as arbiters of their destiny. 

From this probable, though inferential, 
primary consciousness of the Godhead, all 
other phases of the belief may be accounted 
for in a fairly satisfactory manner. Evo- 
lution is a progress from the indefinite and 
homogeneous to the definite and hetero- 
geneous. But in the historical world, as 
Darwin showed in the organic, progressive 
evolution is often accompanied by retro- 
gression or backward development. And 
it ought not to surprise us if, while the 
history of the religious consciousness ex- 
hibits in general a successive unfolding of 
richer and purer forms, a different move- 
ment is observable among those sections of 
mankind which have never felt the vitaliz- 
ing breath of civilization. For the causes ( 
of civilization are also the causes of relig- 
ious development. They are to be sought 



90 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



partly perhaps in the genius of races and 
of individuals, but mainly, I suspect, in a 
larger knowledge of nature with the con- 
sequent development of all the intellectual 
faculties, and in a richer experience of 
social and political events and institutions, 
which has the effect of subduing random 
impulses and self-seeking appetencies as 
well as quickening the activity and enlarg- 
ing the range of conscience and affection. 
When knowledge, morality, and social 
order grow, man's idea of the Godhead 
expands in the same proportion. Where 
they are stationary, it may change, but it 
cannot advance. Primitive religion, there- 
fore, will undergo two fundamental sorts 
of variation : one progressive, in the direc- 
tion of a higher and fuller content; the 
other, non-progressive or, in very unfavor- 
able circumstances, even retrogressive ; that 
is, farther removed from actual reality. 
The first gives us the religions of historic 
races ; the second, those of savages and the 
lowest barbarians. 

The religion of these rude peoples may 
be described as an unorganized polydaemon- 
ism. It consists in the belief in the exis- 
tence of an indefinite and motley throng 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 91 



of spirits who may be controlled by magic, 
which only rarely rises to the attitude of 
worship. It is often designated animism 
or fetichism ; but the terms are used some- 
what vaguely. This religion is considered 
by the English school of evolutionists to 
represent man's earliest consciousness of 
the Godhead. But it almost certainly de- 
mands more reflection and abstraction than 
primitive intelligence was capable of. For 
it implies a clear distinction between soul 
and body, and the peopling of nature with 
independent spirits. And this is much 
less naif and simple than the concrete per- 
sonification of natural objects. From this 
primordial belief it can be readily derived, 
but the sequence of connection cannot be 
reversed. The savage who has arrived 
at the power of reflecting cannot but be 
struck with the strange phenomena of 
dreams, trances, and death. We explain 
dreams by the distinction between objec- 
tive events and subjective illusions. But 
early thought knows no such distinction. 
The savage who dreams he has gone to a 
distant country and met strange inhabi- 
tants can only explain the fact by assum- 
ing that, since his body has lain all the 



92 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



time at home, his soul can go out on jour- 
neys of its own and bring back reports of 
what it sees and encounters. In a swoon 
there seems to be the same temporary ab- 
sence of the soul. At death, the spirit 
quits the body forever, but it continues to 
live a phantom life of its own, and in this 
form often visits the survivors in dreams 
and visions. What we call illusions and 
hallucinations the barbaric psychologist 
treats as direct perceptions of spirits. 
These subtle essences he names after the 
breath which is felt to be the life or soul of 
man ; and even developed languages like 
the Aryan and Semitic still retain the traces 
of this early theory of ghosts. But of 
course not only men, but also horses and 
dogs, and not only animals, but things, in a 
word, all objects of organic and inorganic 
nature, have souls which come and go 
like the souls of men. Naturally, there- 
fore, adoration of spirits supplants the wor- 
ship of concrete natural objects. And of 
spirits the manes of departed ancestors 
occupy a foremost place. They are sup- 
posed to keep up their interest in the liv- 
ing, who consult them, share with them 
secrets, and even provide them with food 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 93 



— a custom of which a survival may still 
be seen on the festival of All Souls, at the 
cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. 

Ancestor-worship has been, and still is, 
one of the great faiths of the world. And 
it has always in its first stages made for 
morality ; since the ancestor who cared for 
his children while alive would punish vio- 
lations of established customs now he had 
become a god. In early times the bond of 
blood was the sole basis of rights and ob- 
ligations. Accordingly, when a deity was 
conceived as a blood relation of a group of 
kinsmen, he brought to their social order 
and morality the superhuman sanctions of 
religion. But while the worship of the 
dead keeps up the old-fashioned virtues of 
the tribe, it prevents all moral progress ; 
and by clinging to the ethical ideals of a 
society that has passed away, it may in 
time become positively injurious. Yet it 
must not be forgotten that the conception 
of the brotherhood of mankind, which is 
the greatest moment of progress in the his- 
tory of morality, rests upon the earlier 
fact of the fraternal relationship which 
actually existed between all members of 
the kindred clan ; and that the sentiment 



94 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



of humanity has still much of warmth and 
zeal to borrow from all the sweet charities 
of parent, child, and brother. 

But the manes of ancestors are not the 
only higher spirits which animistic relig- 
ions exalt above the commonalty of souls. 
As these rule over the life of man, so 
among the nature-spirits there are great 
gods who rule the universe. The highest 
natural deity is apt to be the heaven-god, 
or the soul of the sky. But in savage 
religions this supreme being would seem 
to have little advantage in the innumer- 
able throng of nature-spirits, among whom 
there is no such ground of preference as 
ancestry afforded in the case of the souls 
of the dead. Indeed, the lowlier spirits 
might be the more attractive because they 
seemed more manageable. And there was 
no limit to the multiplication of deities, 
now that they were not dependent for their 
being upon objective reality. At any rate, 
observation of savages, African, Polyne- 
sian, and American, shows us that animis- 
tic religions produced an indeterminate 
chaos of atomistic divinities, whose limited 
powers and mutable destinies put their 
worshippers upon the idea of bringing them 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 95 

into subjection to human caprice. Hence 
the origin of magic, which plays so large 
a part in polydsemonistic religions. Fi- 
nally, as a spirit might be domiciled, forci- 
bly or fortuitously, in any portable object, 
which thereafter served (like an idol) to 
symbolize or represent it, we see at once 
the close connection between animism and 
fetich-worship. Fetichism is in fact the 
lowest form of animism, having much the 
same relation to it as adoration of images 
to worship of the invisible gods. 

The demons or spirits of barbarous relig- 
ions tended to fade away into airy noth- 
ings, the sport of man's superior power 
and caprice, because they had lost that 
local habitation and definite character 
which a fixed connection with natural 
objects gave them in earlier thought. But 
even with a separation of nature-spirits 
from the sphere of their material embodi- 
ment, another course of development was 
also open. If savages dissipated them into 
empty phantoms, races which had reached 
the lower stages of civilization invested 
them with the moral and spiritual poten- 
cies of that life which the worshippers had 
begun to feel and lead. It is written that 



96 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



" God created man in his own image " ; 
but it is no less true, and necessarily true, 
that human thought has always created 
God in the image of man. But it makes 
all the difference in the world to theology 
what is regarded as the essence of the 
human exemplar. Hegel and the Hotten- 
tot alike proclaim the affinity of man and 
the Godhead; but to one the essence of 
man is rational spirit, to the other some 
vague, invisible ether. And the animistic 
divinities, in their fickle and insubstantial 
character, reflect the low, capricious, and 
irrational life of savage tribes, which lacks 
that stablishing and exalting that comes 
only from consecration to the high ideal 
ends of civilization. On the other hand, 
where favored clans amalgamated and cre- 
ated political institutions, so that higher 
morals and better manners became inevita- 
ble, where knowledge grew, and men had 
a freer outlook upon the universe, the 
throngs of personified objects were gener- 
alized into great spirits of nature, which, 
though ruling the world, were nevertheless 
brought into close moral relation with 
mankind. It is of these quasi-personal 
nature-spirits that imagination, with its 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 



97 



eye on the corresponding natural phenom- 
ena, weaves the complex and highly origi- 
nal tissues of mythology. The events of 
nature are co-ordinated into the parts and 
scenes of a drama, enacted by these manlike 
spirits or powers of nature. Such mythol- 
ogies are found in China, India, Persia, 
Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Italy, 
Germany, and, in the new world, in Mexico 
and Peru. They represent the gods as 
relatively independent of their natural 
elements. So far they agree with animism. 
But two essential differences are to be 
noted. First, the detachment from nature 
is never complete (Zeus, for example, al- 
ways remains the heaven-god) ; for the 
myths and stories of the gods and heroes 
manifestly grow out of the personification 
and dramatization of natural phenomena. 
And, secondly, there associates itself to the 
naturalistic aspect of the god an analogous 
spiritual function which has reference to 
some of the ideal ends, moral, intellectual, 
or political, to which incipient civilization 
has already devoted itself. It matters not, 
therefore, whether these mythological re- 
ligions of early civilization be designated 
polytheism or only advanced polydsemo- 



98 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



nism, they indicate a real progress in the 
development of the religious consciousness 
of mankind. The progress, however, is not 
to be measured by the richness or grace of 
mythologies (which certainly reflect the 
imagination of their makers), but by the 
nature of all those ends, moral and spirit- 
ual, in the realization of which the worship- 
ping races have recognized their supreme • 
historical mission, and in relation to which, 
therefore, they could not but fashion the 
character of the gods who presided over 
their destiny. 

For proof and illustration of this position 
let us look for a little while at the concep- 
tions of the Godhead reached respectively in 
the religions of the Indo-Germanic and the 
Semitic races. These great races are the 
bearers of civilization. To the first belong 
the Indians, the Persians, the Letto-Slavs, 
the Germans, the Greeks, the Romans, 
and the Kelts. The latter includes the 
Arabs, the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, the 
Aramaeans, the Babylonians, and the As- 
syrians. The mere collocation of these 
great historic names is enough to remind 
you that I can attempt only the slightest 
sketch of the development of their ideas of 
the Godhead. 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 99 



As comparative philology has proved 
that all the Inclo-Germanic races once pos- 
sessed the same language, so more recently 
has the identity of their original religion 
been established by comparative mythol- 
ogy. This religion bears the clearest im- 
press of its naturalistic origin. And sub- 
lime, as in the main it is, it has not 
altogether escaped the deteriorating ten- 
dency to animism. Still there can be no 
doubt that it derived its god from celestial 
phenomena. They are the "shining ones." 
Chief among them was the heaven-father, 
the Zeus and Jupiter of the Greeks and 
Romans, who was, however, partially sup- 
planted in Indian worship, and altogether 
transformed in character by the Germans. 
Of the Indian development of this old 
Aryan religion, we have a picture in the 
Vedas. What characterizes Vedic religion 
is the moralization of the original powers 
of the sky. The heaven-god, Varuna, who 
created and upholds all things, is the sus- 
tainer, not only of the order of the uni- 
verse, but of moral law in the life of man. 
He punishes iniquities, transgressions, and 
sins ; but to the humble and contrite he is 
gracious and forgiving. The heavenly 



100 



BELIEF IN GOB. 



brightness of the god's material embodi- 
ment is the objective side of his inner 
wisdom and purity of character. And 
this feature of the Vedic consciousness of 
the Godhead is the natural result of an 
infusion of the old Aryan light-gods with 
the spiritual ends to which Indian culture 
had already devoted itself. The evolution 
is clearer in the case of Varuna than in 
the case of Indra, the storm-god, or Agni, 
the fire-god, or Aditya, the sun-god. Yet, 
according to the hymns, Indra was to be 
approached in faith. And Agni was the 
typical heavenly priest, the mediator be- 
tween gods and men, ruler and helper of 
the sacrifice. In this pantheon Varuna 
seems in himself to be the highest god ; 
but the deity actually worshipped is, for 
the time being, regarded as chief, to whom 
all the rest are subject. This monarchy in 
a democracy, ephemeral as is the monarch's 
reign, appears to betoken an endeavor of 
the human spirit to rise from multiplicity 
to unity in its conception of the deity. 

The Vedic religion was followed by 
Brahminism, a system of caste and sacer- 
dotalism. It made little change in the 
theology of the people. But it gave birth 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 101 



to schools of philosophy, whose esoteric 
doctrines overcame the polytheism of the 
masses by identifying the world with the 
divinity, or making him its creator, or even 
by denying altogether its objective reality. 
In this uncontrolled tide of profound 
but fruitless speculation, we find side by 
side the types and elements of much later 
thought: the hylozoism and pantheism of 
the Greeks, Christian theism, the mysti- 
cism of Bohme, the acosmism of Spinoza, 
the ethical atheism of Fichte, and the ab- 
solute idealism of Hegel. Of these forms 
of monistic speculation, the best known, 
though probably not the earliest, is that 
which makes Brahma the world-germ, the 
womb of all existence. But this impersonal 
being is himself, without form or attributes, 
a mere indeterminate unity. And those 
who have reached the " higher knowledge" 
see that this seemingly real world he has 
produced is nothing but an illusion, a phan- 
tasmagoria (Maja). Alongside of this or- 
thodox theology of the Brahmins we find 
the heretical system of Sankhya. It denies 
the unity of the world-soul ; and substitutes 
for it a plurality of individual souls and 
matter. But the outcome is not unlike 



102 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



that of the Vedanta doctrine of Brahma. 
For the soul does nothing ; it only knows. 
And the world is an illusion, the ground of 
which lies in primordial matter. The prac- 
tical result, therefore, of the two schools, 
as of all Brahminic speculation, was the 
self-alienation of the spirit from nature. 
But in this divorce from the real object of 
his knowledge, nothing was left for man 
but mystic introspection, absorption in him- 
self, which was also regarded as union with 
God. In speculative repudiation of the 
things of sense, in monastic renunciation 
of the world, in mystic fusion of the self 
with the eternal Brahma, who neither acts 
nor suffers, lay the chief end and the re- 
demption of man. 

But this deliverance could only be for 
the elect. Buddhism, which followed the 
philosophy of the Brahmins, was a simple 
gospel of universal redemption. It was 
the first national religion to become inter- 
national or universal : a position which has 
since been attained only by Christianity and 
Mohammedanism. Like these, Buddhism 
is steeped with the personality of its 
founder. His relation to Brahminism, 
from which came his contemplative ascet- 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 103 



icism, is much the same as that of Jesus to 
Judaism. It would be too much, however, 
to say that the Brahmins were as the scribes 
and Pharisees. Yet Buddha rejects their 
entire system of tradition, legalism, wor- 
ship, and penance. But whereas Jesus 
proclaims that God is spirit and father, 
Buddha relegates the doctrine of the God- 
head to those metaphysical speculations 
which make not for pious conversation, 
nor unworldliness, nor the destruction of 
desire, nor ceasing, nor rest, nor knowl- 
edge, nor Nirvana. His is a religion 
without God. It is an ethical evangel 
to all the suffering sons of humanity. 
Buddha has read the world-secret of the 
necessity of pain, and offers a way of re- 
demption. Change is the law of the uni- 
verse. As soon as an act of will relieves 
man from the pain of one desire, another 
has taken its place, so that endless pain is 
the consequence of volition. The will, 
therefore, must be extinguished. And its 
extinction is brought about by insight into 
that law of change which makes all desire 
for happiness self-defeating. This is the 
redemption offered by Buddhism, as it is 
the essence of Schopenhauer's pessimism. 



104 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



Nirvana is nothing more nor less than that 
quiescent state of consciousness in which 
desire has been extinguished and the will 
is at rest. It was not so much this doc- 
trine, however, as the gracious personality 
of the man who first realized it, that made 
Buddhism one of the world's great creeds. 
Not, in fact, until it had really become a 
religion by the strange irony of making its 
founder a god, did Buddhism move the 
heart and subdue the intellect of oriental 
nations. But it could not become the 
faith of the more progressive branches of 
the Aryan family. It negated their strug- 
gles for advancement by systematically 
turning away from the world. When its 
first mighty wave of universal compassion 
had spent itself, Buddhism settled down 
to resignation, to quietism, to indifference, 
to the despairing scepticism that comes 
from the absence of a positive ideal of life. 
Though sharing with Christianity a com- 
mon point of departure in the idea and 
felt need of redemption, it lacks the Chris- 
tian conception of the kingdom of God in 
which the yearnings of the spirit find com- 
plete satisfaction, and that, too, through the 
fulness of a life which is the very opposite 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 105 

of the Buddhist panacea, — self-annihila- 
tion. 

When Buddha had been deified, and his 
appearance on earth explained as one of a 
series of incarnations, Brahminism regained 
its hold upon the masses, which had been 
greatly relaxed through its conflict with 
Buddhism, by finding gods adapted to the 
popular consciousness in the two surviving 
elemental deities, Vishnu and Siva. These 
the Brahmins set by the side of their own 
god Brahma. And the philosophical de- 
mand for unity was met by treating all 
three as manifestations of the one primor- 
dial god, Brahma. And not only the doc- 
trine of the Trinity, but the doctrine of the 
God-man, was also familiar to later Brah- 
minism. The avatars of Vishnu, whose 
presence in an individual made that indi- 
vidual very god while still leaving him 
very man, were numerous and various. 
But the most important was Vishnu's in- 
carnation in Krishna. And Krishna be- 
came in Brahminism the rival of the deified 
founder in Buddhism, a divine saviour, an 
incarnation (though but one of many) of 
the highest godhead. 

If among the Indians the old Aryan the- 



106 



BELIEF IN GOB. 



ology developed into a mystic and dream- 
ing metaphysic with an ascetic ethic, among 
their cousins, the Iranians, who dwelt be- 
tween mountains and deserts in a somewhat 
harsh climate, there were preserved, along 
with the ancient hardihood and valor, the 
simplicity of earlier thought and the prac- 
ticalness of earlier morality. The Iranian 
religion, which in later centuries became 
the state religion of Persia, is known as 
Mazdeism or Parseeism, and was ascribed 
to the reformation of Zoroaster. To the 
Brahminist doctrine of the illusoriness of 
the world and the motionless indifference 
of the one real existence, Mazdeism opposed 
the conception of a universal world-struggle 
in which the ever-living and active god- 
head was engaged in overcoming those 
limitations to his absoluteness, which, as 
a matter of fact, seem actually existent and 
operative. Virtue, therefore, could not be 
placed in quietism and renunciation of the 
world, but only in action and struggle, and 
the victory over the world which they en- 
sure. 

Mazdeism inclines both to polytheism 
and monotheism. It exalted far above the 
pantheon of lower divinities Ahura-mazda, 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 107 



the all-wise lord or spirit. The name 
Ahura indicates a connection with Asura, 
the heaven-god of the Hindoos. Ahura is 
glorified as the creator of the world, and 
the source of truth, light, and purity. The 
doctrine of his sublime supremacy was, it 
is probable, the chief element in the preach- 
ing of Zoroaster. But with the survival 
of old Aryan nature-gods, the doctrine was 
liable to corruption. And in fact not only 
these, but new personifications also, some 
of them quite ideal, were grouped about or 
under the supreme Ahura. First came the 
circle of the " sacred immortals," consisting 
of Ahura and six spirits, who seem to be 
personifications of abstract ideas (such, for 
example, as purity, wisdom, immortality), 
though in some cases a sensuous reference 
is also discernible. Beyond these was the 
lower and larger circle of the " worshipful" 
spirits. They consisted partly of old Aryan 
light-gods, and partly of fresh creations out 
of abstract notions. Of the latter sort was 
the personification of prayer as a divine 
logos or creative word. Last in the de- 
scending scale of good spirits came the 
" genii," the souls of the dead and the im- 
mortal part of the living. They prove that 



108 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



Mazdeism had not altogether outgrown the 
animism of ruder peoples. 

The same influence, combined with the 
opposition between light and darkness, may 
help us to understand the dualism of this 
religion. For while it teaches adoration 
only of Ahura and the good spirits who do 
his pleasure, it recognizes the existence of 
a kingdom of evil spirits, subject to Ahri- 
man, the " striker " or " attacker," who is 
the opponent of Ahura, and the source of 
all the evil, sin, and imperfection in the 
world. The good spirits dwell in heaven 
above, the evil spirits in the lower regions. 
And this world, which lies between the 
two, is, as in the cosmography of Paradise 
Lost, the scene of their conflict. The war- 
fare rages everywhere, and in everything. 
It was Ahriman who brought death into 
the world, and seduced the first pair to 
sin. With his deviltries he compasses man 
about on every side. And though Maz- 
deism knows nothing of a fall among the 
angels, Ahriman in all other respects may 
be compared with Milton's Satan. It was 
only in late times he rose to the rank of 
Ahura himself. Originally he was a subor- 
dinate power, and his sole function was to 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 109 

thwart, obstruct, and pervert the good and 
wise ends of the great creator and ruler 
of the world. Man seeks protection against 
him in worship. At death the good walk 
across the bridge to heaven, while the 
wicked, finding it too narrow, tumble into 
the depths of hell, where demons torment 
them till the fire of the great judgment 
burns up Ahriman and all the evil in ex- 
istence. From the flames rise a new heaven 
and a new earth, refined and purified by the 
consuming fire. Over this transfigured 
universe, in which the dead shall have 
been resuscitated (sinners being purged 
and quickened to a new life), Ahura- 
Mazda, in the presence of a glorified and 
redeemed humanity, is to reign f orevermore 
in undisputed supremacy. But this con- 
summation will not come for three thou- 
sand years, and then only at the hand of a 
saviour who is to be conceived of the holy 
spirit of Zoroaster, and born of a virgin 
mother. 

The germs of the dualism of the Persians 
and of the polytheism of the Hindoos are 
to be found in the theology of the Wends 
or Letto-Slavs, which is, however, the low- 
est of all the Indo-Germanic religions. Its 



110 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



nature-gocis have not yet been moralized. 
Its doctrine of spirits is scarcely above the 
level of the animism of savages, if we dis- 
regard its more poetic expression. When 
it was supplanted by Christianity, it was 
still at a stage of development greatly infe- 
rior to that attained by the oldest Vedic 
religion. 

It seems to be due rather to a difference 
of race than of civilization that religion 
attained a higher development among the 
Germans than among the Slavs. The supe- 
riority attaches, however, only to their con- 
ception of the gods : their doctrine of the 
soul and immortality, as well as their rude 
cultus, being obviously a continuation of 
animism. Germanic theology resembles 
Persian. While the Letto-Slavs, in com- 
mon with all the Aryan nations, conceived 
of a dual conflict between the powers of 
nature, the Persians and Germans alone 
gave to the physical occurrence an ethical 
interpretation. The terrible forces of the 
natural world, which were at first pictured 
as giants devoid of moral character, devel- 
oped in course of time into evil beings, 
who stood opposed to the good deities. 
These last, of whom Odin and Thor were 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. Ill 

the chief, were also personified powers of 
nature ; but they were nature-gods who 
had been humanized and moralized. In 
the conflict with the giants, the good dei- 
ties are victorious till the death of Balder. 
Afterwards the monsters of wickedness 
break forth in uncontrolled fury, and over- 
whelm all the ordinances and appointments 
of the world. This is the " twilight of the 
gods." They struggle against this general 
dissolution of the elements, but in the end 
they perish with their assailants. Then 
comes the final act of this great world- 
drama, — a general resurrection, renova- 
tion, and purification, after which man 
lives a life of unalloyed happiness, and the 
supremacy of the highest god continues 
undisputed. 

It was not on Oriental or Germanic, but 
on Hellenic soil, that the spirit of the Aryan 
race produced its richest mythology and its 
highest religion. This superior develop- 
ment is doubtless due to that unique com- 
plex of circumstances which enabled the 
Greeks, if not absolutely to create, at leait 
to invest with full life and perfect form, 
the main branches of human culture, — art, 
science, literature, and philosophy, — and 



112 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



to infuse into conduct and the modes of 
social intercourse a grace and decorum, a 
freedom and dignity, which are quite as 
characteristic of the Hellenic spirit as 
its intellectual and aesthetic achievements. 
The genius of this remarkable people com- 
bined in a wonderful degree the most 
prominent and even opposite characteris- 
tics of human nature. They were at once 
practical and speculative, lovers of beauty 
and lovers of truth, healthfully realistic, 
yet passionately devoted to the ideal, appre- 
ciative of the individual, yet bent on seeing 
the individual in relation to the whole. 
No doubt, too, their bright air and sky, as 
well as the wonderfully varied features of 
their country, have left an impress upon 
their religion. But much greater was the 
influence of free intercourse among them- 
selves and with their foreign neighbors, — 
an intercourse pre-determined and facili- 
tated by their location on the islands and 
coasts which, like an irregular bridge, con- 
nect Europe and Asia. Who can estimate 
the beneficent results of intercourse between 
man and man ? To take only one example, 
it may be said to have moralized the race. 
Within historic times we can see, in con- 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 113 

sequence of intercourse, the narrow mo- 
rality of the tribe expanding to the broad 
code of a multitribal nation ; and in recent 
centuries the same agency has been making 
national morality international and human- 
itarian. Naturally enough, then, it has 
been regarded as a law of the history of 
religions that the richness and elevation 
of their context are proportional to racial 
and inter-racial intercourse. 

Of this law Greek religion is a striking 
example. In the Pelasgic period its gods 
were still nature-powers, and its worship, 
to some extent, fetichistic. Yet through 
assimilation and fusion of foreign ideas, 
many of them Semitic, the Greeks formed, 
in very early times, a circle of divinities 
and heroes, ennobled by all that is best, 
highest, and most divine in man. Our 
earliest picture of this pantheon is con- 
tained in the Homeric poems. The gods 
appear as superhuman beings, who share 
with man intelligence and moral freedom, 
but not less appetites, passions, and all the 
weaknesses flesh is heir to. But a deeper 
view reveals a distinction between the 
gods of poetic mythology and the supreme 
rulers of the world. For, however human 



114 



BELIEF IN GOV. 



in their failings the individual gods show 
themselves, they stand forth in their total- 
ity as the inviolable upholders of moral or- 
der, the sublime judges and avengers of the 
acts of men. And this twofold aspect is 
especially observable in Zeus, who compre- 
hends in his own potent will the will of 
the Olympian council, of which he is the 
chief. Like the Christian pope, Zeus is 
conceived in the Homeric poems to be fal- 
lible as an individual, but infallible as head 
of the sacred convocation. And the anal- 
ogy happily illustrates his relation to the 
other gods, who are scarcely more than 
representatives and executives of the su- 
preme ruler of gods and men. Yet this 
divine monarchy is not to be identified with 
monotheism. For, though the Greek be- 
lieved in a single government of the world, 
and was persuaded that a stern justice pre- 
sided over the affairs of men, he found no 
difficulty in the supposition that it was 
administered by a plurality of gods. There 
was a unity of result without a unity of 
personal agency. Here we touch a striking 
difference between Greek and Jewish the- 
ology. When Plutarch blamed the Jews 
for not making the Deity benevolent and 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 



115 



friendly to man, he showed a right sense of 
the importance of goodness in man's con- 
ception of the divine character, but he 
betrayed utter indifference to the sublime 
Judaic thought of the unity of God. It 
must be added, however, that the greatest 
dangers to Greek religion came rather from 
anthropomorphism than from polytheism. 
It was no easy thing to worship in spirit 
and in truth gods whom tradition, poetry, 
and statuary had invested with definite 
human forms. 

The post-Homeric development of popu- 
lar theology in Greece consisted mainly of 
a purification and deepening of the ethical 
character of the Homeric divinities. Its 
most significant phase was the exaltation 
of Apollo, originally a light-god, to the 
rank of divine author of all moral, intellec- 
tual, and religious illumination and purifi- 
cation. He became the embodiment of the 
ideal ends of life, — of the true, the beauti- 
ful, and the good. Of the clarifying and 
ennobling influence of his worship we may 
form an idea from the lofty and fervid 
odes of Pindar. Yet Apollo is not su- 
preme god ; he is son of Zeus, and media 
tor and saviour of men. Of Zeus himself 



116 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



Pindar's conception is practically monothe- 
istic. But iEschylus reproduces the Ho- 
meric thought of a fate to which even 
Zeus himself is subject. And he illustrates 
both the older view of the implacable jus- 
tice of the god, who visited the iniquities 
of the fathers upon the children even to 
the third and fourth generation, and the 
serene piety of the age of Pericles, which 
mitigated the wrath of heaven and trans- 
formed the envy and jealousy of the gods 
into love, tenderness, and forgiving mercy. 
The best exponent, however, of this highest 
stage of Greek religion is Sophocles. He, 
too, is full of reverence for Zeus. But the 
divine government, instead of being an 
object of fear and awe, is interpreted in 
a spirit of cheerful piety, trustful resigna- 
tion, and heartfelt and simple devotion. 
It is already seen that God is love, and 
that, as in the (Eclijms Coloneus, there is 
reconciliation for even the chief of sinners. 

This ethical monotheism of the choicest 
spirits of the Greeks was in all probability 
above the reach of the multitude. Yet it 
necessarily influenced their thinking, even 
though an unapproachable ideal. The 
same is true of the metaphysical panthe- 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 117 



ism which dominated Greek philosophy 
throughout its entire course of a thousand 
years. As monotheism was the outcome 
of the Greek conception of God as gov- 
ernor of the world and supporter of moral 
order, pantheism w^as the doctrine in which 
the philosophers found an ultimate prin- 
ciple for the interpretation of the universe 
as a whole. The Deity is regarded as the 
soul of the cosmos, and conceived now 
materialistically, now ideally, and again 
in both fashions, without any conscious- 
ness of their distinction. The theology of 
Aristotle, indeed, is an abstract monothe- 
ism, but the outspoken pantheism of the 
Stoics is much truer to the spirit of Greek 
speculation. And though we cannot here 
trace the influence of Greek philosophy 
upon Christian theology, one point of 
juncture may be noted. The soul or rea- 
son of the world, which the Stoics desig- 
nated " Logos," became in the mediating 
philosophy of the Jewish Philo (30 B.C.- 
50 A.D.) the most universal intermediary 
between God and man, nay, the first-born 
son of God, the second God, — thus sup- 
plying early Christianity with the Hellenic 
formula : " In the beginning was the Lo- 



118 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



gos, and the Logos was with God, and the 
Logos was God." 

It now remains to describe briefly the 
character of Semitic religions, of which 
Christianity was the noble fruitage. In 
former times the differences between Se- 
mitic and Aryan religions were supposed 
to be original and fundamental. But more 
recent investigations, conducted in the 
light of a fuller knowledge of primitive 
thought and culture, make it highly prob- 
able that the two races began on lines 
which were scarcely distinguishable. Yet 
from a very early period two differences 
— one psychological, the other historical — 
must have tended to produce divergency 
of development. As between the demands 
of the heart and the head the Semites were 
disposed to satisfy the former, the Aryans 
the latter ; as soon, that is to say, as cul- 
ture had advanced far enough to bring out 
the consciousness of their antithesis. And 
even, unconsciously, the Aryan eye was 
turned outward, the Semitic inward; the 
one seeing nature-gods rather than free 
spirits, the other inclining in the oppo- 
site direction to animism. Hence every 
Semitic clan had its deity, who was the 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 119 

counterpart, not of the forces and aspects 
of nature, but of the longings and wants 
of the worshippers. Such was the inti- 
mate and exclusive relation between Bel 
and the Babylonians, Baal and the Canaan- 
ites, Chemosh and the Moabites, Dagon 
and the Philistines, and, in early times, 
Jehovah and the Hebrews. Of course this 
distinction is not to be carried so far as 
to exclude all objective or cosmic features 
from Semitic theology. On the contrary, 
star-worship is a characteristic of it. Yet 
it remains true that, as the Semites have 
never distinguished themselves in objective 
science, so their theology is prevailingly 
subjective. Their adoration of the supra- 
mundane powers expresses their sense of 
the exalted character of the divinity, and 
of man's absolute dependence upon him. 
This feature of Semitic religion — its rec- 
ognition of a celestial Lord over nature, 
before whom man is very dust — is proba- 
bly due to the historical circumstance that 
the Semites, unlike so many branches of 
the Aryan family, never attained to politi- 
cal freedom, and could therefore only con- 
ceive of the divine government after the 
analogy of the despot's relation to his 



120 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



enslaved subjects. In this conjunction of 
religion with a despotic monarchy may 
also be found an explanation of the sup- 
posed innate tendency of the Semites to 
monotheism. This certainly it is which 
makes the Hebrews appear monotheists 
prior to the Babylonian captivity. 

Among the Semites, as elsewhere, mono- 
theism is the gradual achievement of the 
human spirit. The ancient religion of the 
Arabs was a mixture of nature-worship, 
animism, and fetichism. And these ele- 
ments lived on even after Mohammed, 
transplanting to Arabian soil the kernel of 
Judaism, founded Islam with the formula : 
" There is no God but God, and Moham- 
med is his prophet." Indeed, Islam has 
become a universal religion only by the 
admission of extraneous beliefs and prac- 
tices which are more akin to animism 
than to monotheism; namely, the adoration 
of the saints and the worship of Moham- 
med himself as divine mediator with Allah. 
In the case of the Northern Semites the re- 
ligious development was at an early period 
much more rapid. This was clue to inter- 
course with non-Semitic peoples. Thus 
the inscriptions show the Babylonio-Assyr- 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 121 

ian pantheon to have been derived from 
the theology of the Akkadians, a people 
who in very remote times occupied Meso- 
potamia, where they originated astronomy 
and invented the cuneiform writing. Even 
among the Semites in Syria, Canaan, and 
Phoenicia, the purely Semitic ideas are ob- 
scured by foreign deposits. The gods fell 
into two classes, male and female ; and the 
generic names by which they were denoted 
— Baal and Ashtoreth — must have come 
from Chaldea. It was at any rate a licen- 
tious religion, as was inevitable from the 
sexual analogy on which its theology was 
based. But so little is yet definitively es- 
tablished regarding the evolution of the 
religious spirit of the Semites among these 
branches of the race that no apology is 
needed for turning to the Hebrews. 

The Hebrews, like other Semitic clans, 
had their tribal god, who helped them 
against their enemies, gave oracles for the 
guidance of their national affairs, and de- 
livered judgments in cases too difficult for 
human decision. As the Ammonite had 
Milcom and the Moabite Chemosh, so 
Israel had his Jehovah. It was through 
hard fighting that the Canaanite was driven 



122 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



out of the promised land. Jehovah, there- 
fore, was primarily a god of war. The 
very name Israel means " God fighteth " ; 
and this defender of his people is desig- 
nated the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. 
After their settlement in Canaan and their 
adoption, at the hands of the conquered, of 
an agricultural life, the Israelites naturally 
imitated, in their service of Jehovah, the 
luxurious festivals which the Canaanites 
held in honor of Baal. And in fact the 
two gods were almost identified by the 
masses. Even the most devout worship- 
pers claimed only a supremacy for Jehovah. 
But the religion of Israel was saved from 
extinction by numerous wars, which, as 
they intensified national feeling, revived 
the faith in which it centred and out of 
which it sprang. Jehovah was the bond 
of national unity among the Israelites. He 
had delivered them from bondage; and 
with the priceless boon of freedom, he had 
given them, in the Ten Words, a law of 
social righteousness. They had a national 
destiny and a national god. In peace and 
prosperity they might yield to the sensuous 
attractions of the Canaanite worship. But 
in battle they felt themselves again the 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 123 

host of Jehovah. And by the close of the 
period of the Judges, Canaan had become 
the land of the God of Israel, so that the 
people had no strong motive to worship 
Baal. But the supremacy of Jehovah was 
all that Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon 
maintained ; and even the Baal denounced 
by Elijah stood for a political alliance to 
which the people were opposed. But in 
the eighth century B.C. the prophets began 
to insist upon the worship of Jehovah 
alone. They had arrived at the concep- 
tion of an absolute difference between 
Jehovah and the gods of the nations. 
These were seen to be the reflex of the 
worshippers, without any fixed character 
or steady will of their own. But as the 
prophets pondered over the dealings of 
Jehovah with His people, they perceived 
in Him a will higher and steadier than the 
human, leading them on towards the real- 
ization of a purpose which their own minds 
had never formed. Thus Jehovah approved 
himself a being of moral character and holy 
will, who was bent on making Israel a peo- 
ple of righteousness. Hence arose Hebrew 
monotheism, which as yet remained na- 
tional. That is to say, it had its ground 



124 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



in the organization and historic achieve- 
ment of the nation. The prophet Amos, 
indeed, rose to a larger conception of God 
as the ruler of the destinies of all nations. 
But Israel could realize the thought of 
universal monotheism only through the 
collapse of its own nationality and its long 
exile in Babylon. As the Jewish mind 
then came under the influence of Babylo- 
nian and Persian thought, so in later cen- 
turies it was open to the philosophy of the 
Greeks, and from this blending of Aryan 
and Semitic elements came in due time 
that universal religion which has been the 
soul of European and American civiliza- 
tion. It may be hard to define what the 
Christian religion is. But the religion of, 
Christ consisted in a vivid consciousness 
that Jehovah, whom Jeremiah and the 
second Isaiah described as gracious and 
forgiving to his people Israel, was the uni- 
versal Father, a God of love to every son 
of man. Otherwise expressed, the new 
religion taught that God was spirit, nay, 
the spirit in all spirits, and that in con- 
formity with this nature and relation His 
attitude to man was one of unbroken and 
unlimited love. 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 125 



On its anthropic side the conception of 
the Godhead is here completely and defin- 
itively formulated. The Father-Spirit must 
take the place hereafter of natural or quasi- 
natural powers in man's consciousness of 
God. Instead of hostile divinities, of whom 
even the Greeks retained a memory, namely, 
their belief in the envy of the gods, we see 
a divine heart of infinite love. Though 
those great ideas were soon obscured by 
the emergence of the older doctrines and 
the rise of new dogmas, they were at least 
actually born, and not only born, but real- 
ized and incorporated in the life and teach- 
ings of the divinest of all the sons of men. 
They could, therefore, never utterly perish. 
And in something like their pristine purity 
they seem to be breaking afresh on the re- 
flective consciousness of the modern world, 
which many centuries of education have 
enabled to spell out the meaning of that 
of which religious genius has immediate 
feeling and apprehension. 

But no age or person can do the entire 
thinking of later generations. And as re- 
gards this higher consciousness of God, our 
problem is to make it cosmic as well as 
anthropic. For it originated, let us remem- 



126 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



ber, among a people who had no science of 
nature, for whom nature had no interest in 
comparison with the events and ends of 
human life and history. On the other 
hand, the Aryan conception of God was 
rooted and fixed in the powers and aspects 
of the natural world. They were human- 
ized and moralized, but their objective at- 
tachments were never completely loosened. 
Hence, in its highest reach among the 
Greeks, the Aryan spirit, while postulat- 
ing an ethical monotheism, still cleaved to 
the pantheism which was the necessary 
development of its philosophy of nature. 
Between such a metaphysic and natural 
science, of which the Greeks were also the 
originators, there seems to be a close, if not 
necessary, connection. The union was pro- 
claimed indissoluble by Giordano Bruno, 
the martyr of modern science. And as he 
spoke under the inspiration of the new Co- 
pernican astronomy, so under the influence 
of recent physics and of Darwinian biology 
Professor Tyndall spoke to the same effect 
in his now famous Belfast address. I do 
not hide, therefore, the conviction that the 
problem of the modern theist consists in 
the union of the Aryan and Semitic modes 



ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 127 

of interpreting existence. We must have 
a synthesis of the Father of all spirits with 
the ground of all nature. In other words, 
we shall be satisfied with nothing less than 
anthropocosmic theism. 

The evidence for this hypothesis must 
be considered in the lectures that follow. 



LECTURE IV. 



BELIEF IN GOD AS CAUSE OR GROUND OF 
THE WORLD. 

It is now sixty years since Carlyle ^vrote 
his Characteristics. In that famous essay 
on the evils of reflection he maintained 
this thesis : Unconsciousness belongs to 
pure, unmixed life ; consciousness to a dis- 
eased mixture and conflict of life and 
death; the one is synthetic and creative, 
the other analytic and destructive. To 
Carlyle his own generation (which was of 
course like every other) seemed the most 
intensely self-conscious that ever had ex- 
isted. He complained that all its relations 
to the universe, to man, to God, had be- 
come a matter of inquiry and of doubt. 
Everything had to be anatomically probed 
into and studied ; nothing would go on of 
its own accord and do its function quietly. 
Alas ! alas ! " had Adam remained in Para- 
128 



AS CAUSE OF THE WOULD. 129 

dise, there had been no anatomy and no 
metaphysics." 

Certainly if knowledge was the conse- 
quence of the fall, as scepticism is the 
fruit of knowledge, Adam's continuance 
in Paradise would have dispensed us from 
the obligation to find proofs for the exist- 
ence of God. A man needs proof only of 
that which has become doubtful to him. 
Hence, even in the world as we find it, the 
overwhelming majority of mankind have 
not the slightest personal interest in a dem- 
onstration of the divine existence. Like 
innocent Adam they have not eaten of the 
tree of knowledge, they have not suffered 
from its sour fruit. Extremes meet ; and as 
to the simple peasant so also to the poet ra- 
tional theology is a matter of little mo- 
ment. He sees the divine idea of the 
world, he feels the divine presence in his 
heart; and with the experience of these 
immediate intuitions and emotions, why 
should he heed or need the slow-built argu- 
ments of the intellect? 

They that be whole need not a physi- 
cian, but they that be sick. Were all man- 
kind unreflecting Adams or victoriously 
creative Goethes, we should indeed need 



130 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



no philosophy of religion. But it is be- 
tween this upper and nether altitude that 
modern education leaves her votaries. For 
us the fever of doubt is actually burning ; 
and philosophy is the means to allay it. 
Our belief in the existence of God is not 
fresh and whole as when we absorbed it 
with our mothers' milk. A larger knowl- 
edge and experience has dislocated our 
faith. And we want to know of philoso- 
phy, whether in the march of mind a place 
can still be found for the ancient belief in 
God. The idea of the divine being still 
haunts us, and the heart yearns for its ac- 
ceptance by the intellect ; but as thought 
produced the discord so only thought, free 
and dispassionate, can restore the harmony. 
Can then our faith be vindicated at the 
bar of reason? Are there proofs, valid 
proofs, of the existence of God ? 

Before answering this question, I must 
point out that we have here to do neither 
with a new belief nor with altogether new 
grounds to support it. A being in whom 
the consciousness of God were altogether 
wanting could not be expected to acquire 
it from our argumentation. No descrip- 
tion of color can communicate an idea of 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 131 

it to the blind. The human faculties and 
their normal operations must be assumed. 
And these have brought man in the course 
of human history to a consciousness of God. 
No doubt different conceptions of the God- 
head have prevailed among different peo- 
ples. But the drift and issue of the re- 
ligious consciousness, as it unfolds itself 
in the course of civilization, are clear and 
unmistakable. Accordingly, the grounds 
and motives which led man to form and 
mould the conception of God must still 
be the basis of our proofs for the validity 
of the conception. There is a spirit in 
man, and the way of the spirit is the 
method of the philosopher. He aims to 
bring into the full blaze of consciousness 
the darkling, unsuspected considerations 
that shaped the thinking of the race. It 
would be a mistake, however, to regard 
the philosopher as a mere photographer of 
spiritual processes invisible to the rest of 
mankind. He is also a chemist whose 
crucible is reflective thought. And in it 
he tests the elements which have hitherto 
passed as independent and indissoluble con- 
stituents of human belief. It may very 
well happen, therefore, that a theory which 



132 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



was stable enough for earlier thought will 
fail to produce conviction in us. Only 
since reason is everywhere one and the 
same, the philosopher must recognize in 
that primitive theory a relative truth. And 
in dealing with the grounds of belief in 
God, it is especially important that Ave 
should distinguish the formulas, more or 
less imperfect, in which they have been 
expressed, from the essential substance and 
content which philosophy reflecting upon 
them sees to have been already involved in 
the religious consciousness of the rudest 
thinkers though they themselves were un- 
aware of it. 

Im Anfang war die That. This profound 
saying of Goethe's means in the present 
case that the act and fact of man's appre- 
hension of God preceded his meditating 
afterthought of it. And this situation of 
affairs deserves more consideration than it 
generally receives. That the human spirit 
is, as a matter of fact, in possession of the 
idea of God is an argument for the exist- 
ence of God unless it can be shown that 
certain ideas, though uniformly produced, 
are insubstantial pageants of the phantasy. 
It is no reply to say that all men once 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 133 

believed in the motion of the sun round 
the earth. Science does reveal to us modes 
of behavior of things, of which our ances- 
tors unskilled in experiment and artificial 
observation could have no suspicion. And 
the scientific interpretation of the fuller 
body of facts naturally differs from the 
prescientific interpretation of the narrow 
field of unassisted perception. But exist- 
ence itself as distinguished from its modes 
of behavior is unapproachable by science. 
And if we cast out our belief in God be- 
cause it is prescientific, the same logic will 
forbid us to believe in the existence of a 
self or of an objective world. Real exist- 
ence we cannot prove ; we cannot even con- 
struct it in thought. Our belief in it be- 
longs to the nature of intelligence itself. 
We cannot imagine a consciousness stripped 
of this primary constituent without ceasing 
to be a consciousness. Science may change 
our views of what reality does, but not our 
intuition that reality is. Now human in- 
telligence has recognized two dependent 
realities and one independent reality. It 
knows the soul as unitary substratum of 
all mental phenomena, the world as the 
complex of all natural phenomena, and 



134 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



God as the absolute ground and source of 
both the soul and the world. The thorough 
agnostic repudiates all three realities and 
breaks with common sense. He is con- 
sistent, but for us impossible. Generally, 
however, the divine existence is denied 
while that of the world at least is as- 
sumed. In such a case we demand to 
know why intelligence is allowed to make 
a synthesis of a part of its experience into 
an objective world and forbidden to make 
a synthesis of the residue into a soul, and 
of both soul and world into one absolute 
ground or God. Until this discrimination 
can be justified in some other way than by 
an indiscriminate denunciation of 64 theol- 
ogy " or an undiscerning appeal to that 
obsolete rationalism which forms so large 
a part of the philosophy of Kant, I see no 
^ way of escaping the conclusion that man's 
consciousness of God, as ultimate principle 
of all reality, is at least strong presumptive 
evidence of the real existence of God. 

But there can be no doubt that this evi- 
dence generally fails to produce conviction, 
whether because it escapes observation or 
is really insufficient in itself. The sceptic 
has an idea of God, but he is without be- 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 135 



lief in the objective counterpart. It falls 
to reflective thought, therefore, to discover 
other grounds of conviction. And these 
constitute what are called par excellence 
the arguments for the existence of God. 
These arguments stand related to the tri- 
partite division of the human soul. As 
man is active, rational, and moral, so the 
causality, design, and goodness exhibited 
throughout all existence are judged to be 
the expression of a divine will, intelli- 
gence, and moral nature. The existence 
of this being is demonstrated by showing 
that the world in its origin and orderly 
constitution and man as a moral agent are 
explicable only if we postulate an eternal 
first cause, a wise designer, and a moral 
governor. The grounds, therefore, for be- 
lief in the existence of God are at once 
cosmic and anthropic. The last yields 
what is known as the moral argument. 
The first, which contains the two concep- 
tions of the causation and the rationality 
of the universe, yields respectively the so- 
called cosmological and teleological argu- 
ments for the existence of God. 

Such, in outline, is the argumentation to 
which we now address ourselves. It seems 



136 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



scarcely credible that in proofs which have 
satisfied reason, in the person of so many 
distinguished thinkers, we shall not find 
essential truth. It would be false mod- 
esty, or something worse, however, did I 
not express my conviction that the one 
vital truth which underlies all these argu- 
ments receives but a very imperfect ex- 
pression in any of them. Nor can it be 
attained by a mere synthesis of their com- 
plementary phases. There is needed a 
higher standpoint, — a more spiritual view 
of God, a more dynamic view of the world, 
and a more organic view of their connec- 
tion with one another, and of both with 
man. It is, however, by traversing and 
transcending the successive stages of the 
old theistic argument that thought most 
naturally, if not inevitably, ascends to the 
all-surveying altitude of anthropocosmic 
theism. And I see no better way of estab- 
lishing that theory than by developing it 
in relation to others, whose truth it must 
absorb, whose limitations it must avoid. 
As oldest, simplest, most concrete and pic- 
torial, I begin with the cosmological argu- 
ment for the existence of God. 

This argument originates in a CQndition 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 137 

of mind in which observation (internal, as 
well as external) and reflection, both of 
which are presupposed to a considerable 
degree in the teleological and moral argu- 
ments, are at the very lowest stages of de- 
velopment. Who made it? is a question 
that can properly be asked only where a 
maker and a material apart from the maker 
are both upon the scene. This is the case 
with man, whose entire external activity 
is directed upon the transformation of ma- 
terial masses or elements into new shapes 
or combinations. Thus, the savage makes 
tools and weapons of pieces of stone, and 
the civilized man constructs machinery and 
apparatus of wood, iron, and steel. Now, 
although God, simply because there is noth- 
ing outside him, cannot be a mechanism, it 
is natural for the sensuous, pictorial thought 
of unreflecting humanity so to conceive him. 
This naif anthropomorphism, overlooking 
the absence of the condition absolutely 
necessary for such an analogy between the 
divine and the human activity, represents 
God as standing in the same relation to the 
world as man to the machine his hands have 
fashioned. This picturesque theology takes 
on surprisingly delightful forms in the 



138 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



minds of children. And the infantile races 
all tell their legends of the divine creation 
of the world. That is a graphic myth 
which represents God as living primevally 
in a mussel, whose two shells, when forced 
apart, became heaven and earth, while the 
waters are the streams of perspiration that 
flowed from the struggling creator. Greek 
cosmogony pictures the formation of the 
world from an original chaos. In all these, 
as in the Chaldean legend, the world and 
the gods grow up together ; cosmogony is, 
at the same time, theogony. But in the 
more advanced Hebrew thought of the 
first chapter of Genesis, which seems to be 
dependent upon the Chaldean account of 
creation for its idea of a primeval chaos of 
water and darkness, the spirit of God is 
conceived as pre-existent and independent 
of the chaotic mass, which he separates 
and moulds by the mere fiat of his will. 
No one can fail to recognize in this sub- 
lime story a notion of the Godhead infi- 
nitely higher than in the theogonic myths 
of earlier and more naturalistic thinking. 
And beneath all its graceful touches of Ori- 
ental fancy, which the unimaginative Oc- 
cident has too long taken for the prooe of 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 139 

an abstract system, lies in noble outline 
the essential truth of the dependence of 
the sensible universe upon an infinite and 
eternal Spirit. But the philosopher can- 
not follow the poet in conjoining, in this 
arbitrary, fortuitous fashion, the creative 
spirit and the act of creation. God did 
not first exist, and then, as though in need 
of something else, create a world. It is of 
the essence of spirit to manifest or reveal 
itself. And just because God is spirit, the 
world is his constant expression. Creation 
is the eternal self-revelation of God. Fur- 
thermore, though, in the Biblical narra- 
tive, God is represented as higher than 
nature and independent of it, he is yet not 
the All. Chaos is real, and apparently 
eternal, too. This dualism could not stand 
the examination of thought. And in op- 
position to the Gnostic philosophizings of 
the second century, the church put for- 
ward the dogma of a miraculous creation 
of the world out of nothing. This has re- 
mained the official doctrine of Christen- 
dom. But some of the greatest Christian 
theologians have been unable to maintain 
the dogma in. its original purity. As 
Thomas Aquinas confessed that it could 



140 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



be believed only on the authority of the 
church, so the " angelic doctor " of our own 
day — the venerable James Martineau — 
in his Study of Religion, seems to make 
the creation of the world an eternal pro- 
cess, conceiving it as a self-sundering of 
the deity, in whom in some way the world 
was always contained. That natural sci- 
ence long ago broke with the traditional 
view of creation needs, I suppose, scarcely 
to be observed. 

The husk of the argument from causal- 
ity majr be peeled off and thrown away, 
but its kernel seems to me imperishable 
truth. That soul of truth lies in the recog- 
nition that the world, which is immediately 
revealed to us in sense-perception, and the 
processes of which are recorded in science, 
has a deeper ground than this material 
appearance, — a ground which reflective 
analysis obliges us to hold as spiritual. If 
the scientist is not conducted to this ulti- 
mate source of things, it is because, in his ab- 
sorbing study of the orderly sequences and 
co-existences of events, he is under no obli- 
gation, and finds no occasion, as in general 
he has not the inclination, to raise the 
ultimate question of the ground of the 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 141 



possibility of those phenomena and their 
laws. If, on the other hand, he turns and 
rends the theistic argument from causality, 
it is because, in his repulsion from the 
fanciful and arbitrary forms , in which pic- 
torial thinking has represented it, he loses 
sight of the sole essential content of the 
argument, the witness of the natural to 
the spiritual. His procedure is all the 
more excusable for the reason that the pro- 
fessed champions of theism — not excepting 
so thoughtful and intelligent a reasoner 
as Professor Flint of Edinburgh — have 
almost invariably put forward the accidents 
of the causal argument for Its essence. In- 
sisting that nature is but the name for an 
effect whose cause is God, in just the same 
fashion as one natural event or existence 
is the effect of another, they have not hesi- 
tated to assert that the atoms into which 
science has resolved all material things, 
are " manufactured " articles, supernatural 
creations of God. This attempt to picture 
the making of reality shocks the sound 
instincts of the scientist, without bringing 
any satisfaction to the higher religious 
mind. What is needed is, not a super- 
natural creation of a non-existent world, 



142 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



but a natural interpretation of the world 
we find actually given, and can never anni- 
hilate, even in thought. What both the 
scientific and religious consciousness de- 
mand is a God here in the world, not there 
outside of it or making it. 

Why this argument, in spite of its more 
abstract formulation in terms of causality, 
should yet continue to emphasize only that 
external relation of God to the world which 
the innocent anthropomorphism of infan- 
tile thought pictured as creation, may be 
explained partly by the authority of tra- 
dition, and partly by the presence of an 
underlying truth, for which a more appro- 
priate mode of expression has not yet been 
discovered. In a certain sense, no doubt, 
the creational dogma satisfies the yearning 
of the intellect for an explanation of things, 
but the explanation is so arbitrary, and 
even so childish, that the persistence of the 
dogma can scarcely be due to theoretical 
considerations. But students of human 
civilization know that of all its factors 
none so stubbornly resist change as the 
ideas and institutions of religion. This 
conservatism of the religious consciousness 
explains why the church always seems 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 143 



against the saviours and renovators of man- 
kind. It explains, too, why religious be- 
liefs survive after their grounds have been 
completely undermined by more scientific 
views of nature and of man. Such beliefs 
are apt to perpetuate themselves, apart 
from the unconscious sway of feeling, by 
alliance with ideas and considerations quite 
foreign to those which gave them birth; 
and I cannot but think that the creational 
form of the argument from causality owes 
its present respectability, not so much to 
its theoretical sufficiency, as to its capacity 
for satisfying the devotional needs of a 
certain class of worshippers. Originally 
a philosophy of the world, it is now a mere 
postulate of the heart that craves a more 
human God than it can find throbbing in 
the pulsations of universal being. For the 
worship of such a heart, God must be 
sharply separated from the cold, mechan- 
ical realm of natural law ; and this external 
realm must yet be so subject to the divine 
will that interference with its normal order 
must be permissible if the prayer of faith 
demands it. Both ends are gained by 
making God the arbitrary creator of a 
world which is conceived as an instituted 



144 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



mechanism, not as a spontaneous life. But 
the presuppositions that require such con- 
clusions are those of a narrow piety, how- 
ever sincere. The error consists in forcing 
the given facts of the universe into an 
arbitrary scheme of our own making, which 
is quite foreign to them. What God is 
we can know only through the revelation 
he has made of himself in nature and in 
the soul of man. It is therefore manifestly 
illogical to begin by assuming there is any 
incompatibility between the course of the 
world and the heart of the eternal. The 
one must express the other, as the coun- 
tenance is the image of the soul within. 
If God's ways are not as our ways, nor his 
thoughts as our thoughts, it is surely a 
mistaken piety that continues to assert they 
are, and refuses to study the divine char- 
acter in the one record in which it is 
described, — a record that is perennially 
unfolding itself to him who has eyes to 
look into the mysteries of the life of man 
and of nature. These are the tokens by 
which we shall know the ever-living, ever- 
active God. Others there are not, howso- 
ever we may fondly dream. To him who 
examines these comes wisdom, and the be- 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 145 



ginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. 
In awe and reverence the new-born soul 
discerns that the one great fact is the eter- 
nal life of God. Man recognizes that his 
own highest life consists in hopeful, trust- 
ful resignation to the Infinite Spirit, with 
whom he feels himself in union and com- 
munion. The glow of such a faith con- 
sumes the somewhat selfish piety which 
thinks of God as existing mainly to guar- 
antee satisfaction to the wishes and desires 
of the human heart. He that loses his life 
shall find it. In this joyous resignation to 
the will of the Father-Spirit man will cease 
to think of nature as a set of arrangements 
instituted mainly with reference to man- 
kind; and, with this practical prejudice 
removed, theoretical reflection will be left 
free to show that nature is the living gar- 
ment of God, as eternal as the infinite 
spirit of whom it is the revelation. It is 
therefore only the lowest kind of piety 
that needs for its support that dogma of 
creation which thought can never accept. 
It is the piety that would construct the 
world according to its preconceived ideas. 
Substitute for it the higher piety, which 
accepts in faith, hope, and love the given 



146 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



facts of the universe, as the eternal expres- 
sion of the mind of God, and the heart will 
have no motive for suggesting an obsolete 
interpretation of the essential content of 
the argument from causality. But heart 
and mind, according well, will now recog- 
nize that the underlying truth of the dogma 
of creation is the eternal dependence of 
the world upon God. 

I have dwelt on this point at some length 
beCau'se I am convinced it is not so much 
the theoretical grounds (which are yet to be 
examined), but the supposed needs of the 
pious heart, that lend support to the dogma 
of creation, and put philosophical theists 
upon the track of defending it by an ap- 
peal to the law of causality. Those well- 
meant efforts, it will be seen presently, end 
in failure. But let me here point out that 
the insistence upon the dogma of creation 
as essential to belief in God, has given ag- 
nostics an opportunity, which they have 
not missed, of undermining all theology. 
Who taught Mr. Herbert Spencer that " ul- 
timate religious ideas " all arise out of and 
converge upon the question of the origin 
of the world ? Those theists, I should an- 
swer, who, instead of seeking God here 



AS CAUSE OF THE WOULD. 



117 



and now as ultimate principle of the uni- 
verse, both in its own being and in our 
knowledge of it, refuse to see him at all, 
if not as an external creator in long past 
ages. Taking the problem, as those theists 
have formulated it, Mr. Spencer easily 
shows it to be insoluble. His reasoning, 
indeed, is not new. It consists in showing 
that even if we grant the assumptions of 
the creationist, his theory cannot be real- 
ized in thought : it is a mere name or sym- 
bol of a process wholly unintelligible to 
us, because outside of the circle of our 
experience. And, secondly, it would not 
in the least help us to understand the ori- 
gin of the materia] of which the universe 
consists. No simile can make intelligible 
to us the creation of matter out of nothing, 
which is the real mystery. Then, lastly, 
it might be asked, How came there to be 
an external agency? But without dwell- 
ing upon this last point, we have enough 
left to warrant the rejection of the crea- 
tionist's dogma. And Mr. Spencer rejects 
it. In my opinion, a great gain might 
thereby have enured to theology, had not its 
defenders identified with this suppositious 
creation the fact of the existence of God. 



148 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



But as the case stood, Mr. Spencer was en- 
titled to say : " If it is from the creation 
of the world you argue to a First Cause, I 
declare God unknowable, since creation is 
absolutely inconceivable." But Mr. Spen- 
cer was not entitled to go farther. As 
originator of the world at some point of 
time, God is certainly inconceivable. But 
as eternal ground of all existence, God" is 
not only conceivable, but necessary to the 
thought that goes far enough in its analysis 
of given reality. How short a journey Mr. 
Spencer made in this direction is evidenced 
by his naif designation of the doctrine of 
the eternal existence of the world as the 
atheistic theory, and his declaration that 
self-existence is rigorously inconceivable. 
The fact is, he has been taught by the 
theist there is no God who does not begin 
things; and since he finds no evidence of 
such absolute origination, which is also in- 
conceivable, he draws the all too hasty con- 
clusion that the power which the universe 
manifests to us is utterly inscrutable. Thus 
agnosticism becomes the theoretical result 
of that practical postulate of the pious heart 
which demands that God shall have cre- 
ated the world in order that he may control 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 149 

it with some reference to the needs of man- 
kind. The dogma that, on a certain plane 
of reflection, reconciles head and heart in 
religion, on a higher plane proves incon- 
ceivable to the one and unrefreshing to the 
other. 

I have failed in my purpose if it is not 
now clear to you that, logically considered, 
there is no connection between the ques- 
tion of the existence of God and the sup- 
posed creation of the world in time. Or, 
to speak more precisely, as we do not know 
that the world had a beginning in time, and 
see no evidence to suppose it had, while the 
very thought is beset with inner contradic- 
tions, it is impossible to base on such a 
supposition our belief in the existence of 
God. This conclusion, however, you may 
hesitate to accept until a fuller hearing has 
been given to those who, denying our doc- 
trine of the eternal existence of the world, 
hold that it originated in time, and is, 
therefore, an effect which must have been 
produced by an adequate cause — a cause 
that there is other warrant for identifying 
with God. 

To these defenders of theism I readily 
concede all that is demanded by the most 



150 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



favorable interpretation of the principle of 
causality. Whatever has begun to be, 
whether a thing or an event, must have a 
cause or antecedent which accounts for it. 
So much may be admitted as self-evident. 
And its self-evidence, let us grant, is not 
affected by Hume's irrefragable demonstra- 
tion that we can give no reason for the 
necessity which always attaches to our 
thought of the relation between cause and 
effect. For everything that has come to 
be, there is a cause of its coming to be. If, 
then, it can be shoAvn that the universe had 
a commencement, it may be maintained 
with absolute certainty that there existed 
a cause adequate to this great event. On 
the other hand, the causal principle has no 
application unless it can be proved that the 
world had a beginning. If it be an eternal 
existence, thought does not demand any- 
thing further. Accordingly, it will be ad- 
mitted by every candid mind that the 
argument for the divine existence which 
is based on the principle of causality can 
be no stronger than the proof that the 
world actually had an origin in time. 

How, now, is the absolute beginning of 
the universe to be established? That the 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 151 



individual objects we perceive have all 
come into existence, nobody will be dis- 
posed to call in question. They are com- 
pounded of divers elements which came 
together in the lapse of time. There was 
a period when the strata of the earth's 
crust had no existence, when the earth 
itself was not, and the living things that 
creep upon it, when sun, moon, and stars 
were a blank, and all our world one vast 
abyss of impalpable ether. But when facts 
like these are cited to prove that the uni- 
verse is an effect, the one important cir- 
cumstance is overlooked, that if at any 
given moment the universe is an effect, its 
cause is found in the state of the universe 
at the preceding moment. We find no such 
thing as an absolute beginning. Alike in 
our examination of particular objects and 
of the entire solar system, what we find is, 
that reality abides, while its phases vary. 
The confusion between relative and abso- 
lute beginning, which is unavoidable for 
immature thought, but which the Hellenic 
mind had overcome in the first stage of its 
philosophy, ought not to have been offered 
as the foundation of theism to a generation 
that had just made the great discovery of 



152 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



the law of the conservation of energy and 
the indestructibility of substance. To the 
modern scientist, as to the ancient Greek 
cosmologist, the universe is eternal, but 
subject eternally to evolutions and disso- 
lutions. As a whole, it is not an effect of 
anything outside itself. And if you cannot 
find God in the world as its substance and 
very self, you certainly cannot make him 
first cause of what you have so far failed 
to prove an event in time. 

But at this point the argument from 
causality takes a new turn. It admits for 
the nonce, at any rate, that there is some- 
thing eternal in the physical universe ; and, 
having identified this eternal element with 
dead atoms, it challenges them alone to 
produce the world we know. The chal- 
lenge is unanswerable. Matter and motion 
are in the world ; but they are its mechan- 
ism, not its essence. The atomistic theory 
furnishes a useful net to catch the world 
in for the purpose of expressing its rela- 
tions by mathematico-physical formulae. 
But of course it abstracts from everything 
in the world save, extended atoms moving 
in a void. And these no more constitute 
the universe than a skeleton constitutes 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 



153 



the living organism that once built it up 
for the development of its own life. When 
the atomistic framework of thought is rep- 
resented as the formative principle of the 
cosmos, the abstract thinker has simply 
become the slave of his own abstractions. 
Of course the germ of the universe must 
have been pregnant with all that the uni- 
verse has since become. There, too, lay 
order, unity, life, thought. But this per- 
fectly just conclusion makes against that 
separation of nature and spirit, of which 
our theist was guilty when he admitted, at 
least for the sake of argument, the exist- 
ence of eternal and immutable atoms of 
matter. Material atoms, he argues, even 
if eternal, could not produce our world. 
Ordering intelligence is necessary. But 
the law of parsimony forbids the assump- 
tion of two ultimate causes if one is suffi- 
cient. Matter alone is not sufficient. But 
mind which originates the universe, when 
matter is given, could presumably have 
created its materials as well as control 
them. Therefore, a Supreme Intelligence 
is the cause of the universe. The argument 
which began with conceding the eternity 



154 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



of matter ends with an assurance of the 
eternity of spirit alone. 

But neither has this intellectual somer- 
sault made good the position, without 
which the argument from causality is of 
none effect. It has not yet been shown 
that the universe actually had a beginning 
in time. The one-sided abstraction of ma- 
terialism has been brushed away by an 
equally one-sided abstract spiritualism. 
Matter is a mere symbolic conception. 
What we actually know is a complex of 
material things, arranged and organized 
as nature. Go back as far as science and 
imagination can carry you, and this exter- 
nal sphere, however changed in aspect, re- 
mains still a cosmos. To posit, therefore, 
the eternity of a chaos of atoms is a sheer 
absurdity. You can reach it only by an- 
nihilating in thought this orderly reality 
that is given to us. You pulverize the 
body of nature, and then find the dust 
inadequate to produce the universe. You 
next call in the aid of Intelligence. But 
being unwilling to accept two ultimate prin- 
ciples, you ask us to believe that spirit once 
existed without embodiment, and sometime 
afterwards manufactured nature. Mean- 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 155 

time we have waited patiently for the 
indispensable proof that nature, both the 
inner spirit and the outer material expres- 
sion, was not an eternal existence. The 
refutation of materialism, far from touch- 
ing this question, only showed that the 
universe, whether created or uncreated, is 
the scene of intelligence, as well as of 
mobile and extended atoms. That one of 
these was prior to the other has as little 
meaning as that two intersecting lines are 
prior to the angle they enclose. We can 
in thought attend either to the intersecting 
lines or to the enclosed angle ; but in reality 
there never can be an angle without inter- 
secting lines, nor intersecting lines without 
an angle. Similarly the universe we knoAV, 
and therefore the only universe we can talk 
about, embraces not only moving particles 
but a plan of their arrangement, and not 
only a material cosmos but organic life and 
self-conscious thought. In this case, it is 
true, natural history assures us there was 
a time when the earth held no living or 
thinking beings. But since they have act- 
ually appeared, it is certain there never was 
a time when nature had not the capacity 
of producing them. And instead of regard- 



156 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



ing nature before their emergence as a chaos 
of atoms, we are bound to interpret it as a 
developing cosmos, which contains in itself 
the promise and potency of all terrestrial 
life and intelligence. To ask if the atoms 
took counsel together and formed the world, 
is an absurd question, for it supposes atoms 
existing apart from intelligence. But atoms 
are merely the hypothetical elements of that 
material vesture in which spirit has eter- 
nally expressed itself. Spirit is the eternal 
reality, and nature its eternal manifesta- 
tion. The vice of the argument for the 
origination of the world in time is, that it 
mistakes the relation between intelligence 
and its expression for an opposition of 
entities, of which one has to be shown 
prior to the other. In truth, nature is the 
externalization of spirit, and no more sep- 
arable from it than the spoken word from 
the thought it symbolizes. 

I think it will now be conceded that 
the argument from causality, through fail- 
ure to prove that the universe began in 
time, cannot demonstrate the existence of 
a First Cause outside the universe. And 
this conclusion is independent of Kant's 
dictum that the causal relation holds good 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 157 

only of phenomena within the universe, 
not of the universe itself and something 
beyond. I will not object to your apply- 
ing the causal relation to the universe as 
a whole, provided you can show that, like 
any other effect, it has come into existence 
at some moment of time. But this con- 
ditio sine qua non it is impossible to satisfy. 
Hence I conclude that the truth of the 
argument from causality lies not in an 
extra-mundane Cause or Maker of a cre- 
ated world, but in an intra-mundane Cause 
or ground of an uncreated world. Against 
both these latter conceptions, however, 
Kant would protest. Restricting causality 
to sensible phenomena, and maintaining 
we could know nothing of what lay be- 
yond or beneath, he would pronounce the 
conception of an " intra-mundane cause " 
an empty illusion. I have shown, in an 
earlier lecture, that this agnosticism is in 
large part the outcome of a rationalism 
which later thought has completely over- 
come. And with the modern view of the 
relation between sensation and thought, 
we find it perfectly legitimate to interpret 
sensible phenomena, which are only the 
raw material of knowledge, in terms of 



158 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



their supersensuous ground. And the real 
meaning of the argument from causality 
is that the objects we perceive by sense 
are not themselves ultimates, since their 
material character of independence van- 
ishes in the light of reflective thought; 
and that, standing as they do in fixed 
relations to one another as members of a 
single cosmos with a single system of laws, 
they must be interpreted as moments of 
one underlying reality, which to explain 
all their characteristics, can only be con- 
ceived as an infinite spirit. The conten- 
tion that this spirit has expressed itself 
eternally through nature will also be met 
by the Kantian disproof of the eternity of 
the world. But keen as is the reasoning 
in all Kant's antinomies, which Hegel re- 
garded as the crowning achievement of 
the Critique, I can find no contradiction 
in the thought that far as we recede in 
time we never touch the initial point of 
existence. And since what is true of the 
area actually traversed by thought is true 
of all that remains, we may, following the 
reasoning of the mathematicians, conclude 
that nowhere had the world a beginning 
in time. On the other hand, Ave can see 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 159 

the absurdity of annihilating at any given 
stage of our regression the universe which 
is given to us as real. If such legerdemain ' 
is practised for the sake of winning a deity, 
it is certainly unnecessary; for God is ever 
present, underneath our hands and among 
our feet, in the actual world which is given 
to us and which we can think of only as 
eternal. 

Our datum is the universe of reality. A 
sound philosophy must discover God, if 
there be a God, here and now at the heart 
of this reality. When we think of it as 
non-existent to make place for a creator, 
we are only playing with an abstraction 
that could never have been formed save 
as an opposite to the given fact of exist- 
ence. 

It may further be remarked that our 
views of matter have undergone a great 
change since Locke gave to the argument 
from creation its first classic expression in 
modern philosophy. We still hold that 
the invisible things of God are clearly 
seen from the existence of the world, be- 
ing understood by the things that appear, 
even His eternal power and Godhead ; but 
we can talk no longer of a making, manu- 



160 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



facturing, or creating of matter. Yet to 
Locke such creation of an incogitative 
material being seemed one and the first 
great piece of God's workmanship; and 
for that reason he refused to think of mat- 
ter as co-existent with an eternal mind. 
Now were mind mere thought and matter 
mere passive extension, as the philosophy 
of the seventeenth century conceived them, 
we might hesitate to bring them together 
in one existence. But the science of later 
centuries has shown that we can draw no 
clear line between cogitative and incogita- 
tive beings (to use Locke's phrases), and 
that this seemingly passive, inert matter 
that forms the stuff of the world consists 
of elements or molecules, whose essence 
lies in activity and which can scarcely be 
distinguished from souls. Or, in more 
precise terms, while Locke's conception of 
nature was that of a vast mass of dead 
extended substance, we know it as an in- 
finitude of activities, ranging from mole- 
cules to souls and forming an aggregate 
which is a cosmos, whose containing, vivi- 
fying, and ordering principle is God. For 
Locke, the Deity is needed only as creator 
of the inert world. For us, He is the 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 161 



universal life in which all individual ac- 
tivities are included as moments of a single 
organism. Of these individual activities 
that constitute what we call the created 
world some are higher than others, some 
have risen to the relative independence of 
self-conscious souls ; but none of them are 
other than parts or functions of the eter- 
nal life of God, who, as the Scripture says, 
is above all and through all and in all, and 
in whom we live and move and have our 
being. 

We have now reached a point of view 
from which it may be seen that the relation 
of God to the world is not happily described 
in terms of causation. God is the imma- 
nent ground of the universe. The universe 
is the eternal expression of the divine will. 
But as ordinarily understood, cause and 
effect express a relation between finite and 
separable things. This is too meagre a 
category for representing the eternal con- 
nection between the existence and the 
external or mundane manifestation of the 
infinite Spirit. But in a way not often 
suspected the notion of cause and effect 
does, as Lotze has in recent times insisted, 
lead to this very conception of the God- 



162 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



head. The course of the argument must 
now be exhibited, although its abstractness 
demands fuller treatment than can be given 
to it in the remainder of this lecture. 

The causal relation is absolutely neces- 
sary for our apprehension of the facts of 
the universe. So much even Hume admits, 
sceptical as his theory of causation is. 
Now although science can get along with 
abstracting from everything in this relation 
save order in time, we fall victims to our 
own abstractions when we suppose that 
causation is nothing else than uniformity 
of sequence or co-existence. This is only 
the temporal expression of a real connection 
between things. How there came to be 
such a thing as causal efficiency in the 
world we can no more explain than how 
there came to be an actual, and not merely 
a thinkable, world, or why, given reality, it 
should not have been in everlasting rest 
rather than in an eternal state of becoming. 
But given the fact of efficient causation, 
Ave may, nevertheless, ask what we mean 
by that fact and how the universe must be 
constituted to make it possible, mysterious 
as in its nature the fact will still remain. 
In a word, how can things act on one 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 



163 



another, as we say they do when causally 
connected ? 

This mutual influence is ' generally at- 
tributed to contact in space. And in many 
cases, if not in all, the approximation of 
one body to another is the indispensable 
condition of their reciprocal action. But 
this observation, customary as it is, gives 
no explanation of the real ground of all 
physical occurrence. What inner con- 
nection is there between contact in space 
and the exertion of physical action ? If 
two beings were really independent of one 
another, how could a change of position in 
space affect their self-contained sufficiency 
or induce them to become dependent upon 
one another? If through a certain co- 
existence in space (contact, for example) 
two things originally and essentially in- 
different to one another are forced out of 
their indifference and compelled to have 
respect to one another, so that the one orders 
its states according to the states of the 
other, then it must be supposed that this 
co-exutence is more than a co-existence 
in space, being perhaps a metaphysical 
co-existence of which the spatial is only a 
symbol, and consequently that the self- 



164 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



sufficing independency of the two things 
is not actual, but apparent only in and 
through the isolating nature of space. At 
any rate, mere spatial contact does not 
explain why things originally indifferent 
to one another, become susceptible of 
mutual action or wherein action consists. 

Equally unintelligible is the popular 
saying that in efficient causation some 
influence passes over from the cause to the 
effect. The states of A are A's and the 
states of B are and as the first cannot 
leave their attachment and wander over to 
B, neither could B receive them if they 
did. And were the case otherwise the 
problem would still remain; only instead 
of asking why we should now ask why 
a state of A should produce a change in 
B, which was originally self-sufficing and 
independent of everything else. The 
causal relation, in a word, cannot be 
thought without contradiction if we con- 
tinue to represent it as a transference of 
efficacy from one independent element to 
another. This conception of transeunt 
action must be abandoned. And so much 
was recognized by the authors of the 
theories of Occasionalism and Pre-estab- 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 165 

lished Harmony, whatever other defects 
may be found in their systems. How 
causal action is produced, how it comes 
about that the realization of a certain con- 
dition effaces one state and superinduces 
another in the real world, no philosophy 
can pretend to explain. But given this 
indubitable fact, then it may be thinkable 
from one point of view and unthinkable 
from another. Now that the occurrence 
of something should be the condition of 
the occurrence of something else we readily 
admit so long as both states fall within 
the unity of a single being. But that a 
state of one being should be the condition 
of the state of another separate and inde- 
pendent being is little less than contra- 
dictory. The former operation we call 
immanent, the latter transeunt. Mani- 
festly then, the desideratum of thought is 
that causality shall be construed as the 
immanent operation of one single and real 
being, as infinite as the universe whose 
processes we apprehend through the notion 
of causal efficiency. 

The unity of being is involved in the 
notion of reciprocal action between indi- 
vidual beings. If A and B were really 



166 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



independent and self-subsisting unities, the 
states of A would be quite indifferent to 
B, But A and B are so far from this 
mutual indifference that each concerns 
itself with the states of the other and con- 
forms its own to them. Nothing remains 
for us, therefore, but to surrender the vul- 
gar belief in the existence of a multiplicity 
of independent things. There is but one 
real being ; and of it A and B and all ex- 
isting things must be conceived as parts, 
moments, or functions. We perceive them 
separately; but they are not really inde- 
pendent and self-subsisting. The difficulty 
in understanding the influence of A upon 
B vanishes when the false supposition 
which we all bring from " common sense," 
namely, that finite things, so long as they 
exist, have an absolute existence, is re- 
placed by a philosophical monism that 
treats them, not as self-subsisting essences, 
but as manifold elements, of which the 
existence and content (to appropriate the 
language of Lotze) is throughout condi- 
tioned by the nature and reality of the one 
self-identical existence of which they are 
organic members. In a case of reciprocal 
action, when A becomes a, B becomes 5, 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 167 



and we nai'vely describe the occurrence as 
the transeunt operation of one isolated 
reality upon another. But when A and 
B are recognized as modifications of the 
one absolute being, it will be seen that the 
change of A to a is already a change in this 
absolute being. And if this absolute being 
is to maintain its identity it must set up a 
compensating change or state J, which ap- 
pears to our apprehension as a change in 
the thing B. Thus what seems to us an 
action of A upon B is in truth only an im- 
manent operation of the one absolute being. 
In maintaining its own identity, it brings 
about that appearance of connection be- 
tween A (a) and B (ft), each of which is 
complementary to the other, in expressing 
the ever-abiding import of the one absolute 
being. 

Efficient causation is a fact. It cannot 
be interpreted without contradiction as an 
action between independent beings. The 
assumption, which in common life we all 
make, that there is a multiplicity of origi- 
nally self-subsisting things, must therefore 
be abandoned. In its place we must set 
the postulate of one absolute being, of 
which so-called things are merely states or 



168 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



modifications. In this absolute being and 
for it, through it, and by means of it, and 
above all for the sake of it, individual 
things exist, act, and cease to exist. Of 
these immanent existences some are mere 
states of the absolute reality; others are 
also self-conscious subjects, which in a 
measure lift themselves above and outside 
the universal basis of existence. The dif- 
ference between the two groups is, in 
Hegelian language, that of being an sich 
(in itself, or simply) and being fur sich 
(for itself). To the former class belongs 
the whole world of impercipient things, 
with all their so-called activities. To the 
latter class belong all spiritual beings, that 
is, every subject which is conscious of its 
states and opposes itself to them as the 
permanent unity that has them. That is a 
subject of states, which distinguishes itself 
from its states. That is a unity which op- 
poses itself as one to the multiplicity of its 
states. But this spiritual life, of which we 
are immediately aware in ourselves, is pre- 
cisely what is required of the absolute be- 
ing if it is to satisfy the conditions for the 
sake of which it was postulated. The uni- 
tary, all-embracing reality, which emerged 



AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 169 

from our analysis of efficient causation, 
takes accordingly the characteristics of an 
infinite spirit. 

Thus the causal argument proper points 
to anthropocosmic theism. And the causal 
argument improperly so designated, namely 
the inference from creation, contains at least 
the truth of the eternal dependence of the 
world upon God. But the nature of that 
being which is the ground of the world, 
and which we have called God, remains as 
yet undefined. We have, indeed, expressed 
a conviction of the life and spirituality of 
the one absolute reality. For we could 
find nothing but living spirit that was able 
to solve the problem of holding together 
in a unity those modifications or moments 
into which our analysis of causality com- 
pelled us to resolve all finite things. And 
this spirit must be volitional as well as 
self-conscious ; for without will there 
could be no activity, no efficient causa- 
tion, no material universe. But further 
determination of that absolute life, as it is 
in itself and as it manifests itself in nature 
and in human history, is necessary to the 
satisfaction both of the philosophical and 
the religious consciousness. And this I 



170 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



hope will be to some extent attained in 
the two remaining lectures, the next of 
which will start with the argument from 
teleology. 



LECTURE V. 



BELIEF IK GOD AS REALIZING PURPOSE 
IN THE WORLD. 

We have convinced ourselves that the 
ground or immanent "cause" of the uni- 
verse must be an Infinite Spirit. Of the 
nature of spirit we are immediately aware, 
through our own self-conscious experience. 
In the light of this microcosm we must 
regard ultimate reality as a subject con- 
scious of states, which it distinguishes from 
itself as the unity that has them and holds 
them together, and as a subject exerting 
will-power whereby changes are produced 
in the totality of these states, yet without 
detriment to the identity of the absolute 
life they all express. This is the underly- 
ing truth of the argument from a First 
Cause. It takes the universe up into the 
eternal life of God. 

Popular thought, as usual, attempts to 
gain pictorial distinctness by turning this 

171 



172 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



organic union into a process of fabrication 
with well-marked differences of space, of 
time, of power, and of essence between the 
universe and God. God was first, and the 
world afterwards ; and as in the regressive 
eternity he was alone before its creation, 
so in the progressive eternity he will be 
alone after its annihilation. The world is 
limited in its extension ; but God fills the 
immensities of space. The world is a store- 
house of second causes ; God is the First 
Cause ; and though it was he who invested 
the world with its powers, that was long 
ago, and ever since the world has gone 
on of itself, while he has been a mere 
sabbatic observer. God is the absolutely 
perfect being ; the universe, like every- 
thing finite, is imperfect. Such is the hard 
and fast theology of popular thought, of 
which the deism of the eighteenth cen- 
tury is the most highly developed sample. 

But these theses are all not merely arbi- 
trary and improbable, but unthinkable and 
contradictory. What God did he was al- 
ways doing ; and the universe is the eter- 
nal manifestation of his activity. If you 
call it a creation, it is a continuous crea- 
tion. And those second causes, which you 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 173 

tliink stored up in the material universe, 
— Avhat are they but centres of energy 
through which the one supranatural will 
pours forth his all-animating life and 
power ? The world is not a machine, 
charged with limited dynamics, but the 
expression of one ever-active and inex- 
haustible will. Furthermore, that the ex- 
ternal manifestation is as boundless as the 
life it expresses, science makes exceedingly 
probable. In any event, we have not the 
slightest reason to contrast the finitude of 
the world with the infinitude of* God. At 
the farthest imaginable remove of space, 
the universe stretches indefinitely beyond, 
and we can think of it only as illimitable. 
Lastly, as the universe, at every moment 
of its existence, expresses at least a phase 
of the divine life, its so-called imperfection 
resolves itself into a momentary aspect, a 
part, of a perfect whole. At no moment 
does it reveal the absolute fulness of the 
divine life ; but at no moment is it any- 
thing else than a function of that divine 
life. 

Nor let us draw back from these inexor- 
able demands of thought as pantheistic. So 
long as Ave have an infinite spirit holding 



174 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



communion with finite spirits, we need not 
be terrified by a terminological bugbear. 
And this essential of theism (of which we 
shall have more to say in the next lecture) 
is certainly not endangered by the cosmic 
philosophy I have just propounded in refu- 
tation of deism. That nature should be 
comprehended as the living tissue which a 
divine spirit is ever a-weaving may be un- 
acceptable to the unreflecting masses, as 
it certainly is to the materialistic philoso- 
pher ; but there is nothing in the doctrine 
dangerous, or even antipathetic, to natural 
theology. I cannot even agree with those 
who think that the theist is concerned to 
maintain the actuality of a divine life or 
agency beyond the natural order of things, 
and prior to it. For if the natural order 
is eternal and infinite, as there seems no 
reason to doubt, it will be difficult to find 
a meaning for "beyond" and "prior." Of 
this illimitable, ever-existing universe God 
is the inner ground and substance. He is, 
of course, no more identical with the world 
than a man's self is identical with his 
body. It may, therefore, readily be con- 
ceded that God is more than the contents 
of nature, if by these is meant a summa- 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 



175 



tion of all natural existences as perceived 
or perceivable by the senses. On the other 
hand, there is no evidence, nor does any 
religious need require us to believe, that 
the divine being manifest in the universe 
has an actual or possible existence some- 
where else, in some transcendent sphere ; 
though in such a supposition there is, of 
course, no contradiction, and it has re- 
cently been urged with noble fervor by 
Dr. Martineau. That God should speak 
his whole being in the world of natural, 
animate, and human powers seems incredi- 
ble to this great religious thinker. Agree- 
ing in the doctrine of All-immanency, which 
finds nothing in the objective world but 
God, he couples with it the doctrine of 
Some-transcendency, which makes God not 
only almighty in the sense of all the infin- 
ite might there is, but mighty for abso- 
lutely all things, conceivable and real alike. 
Now, it is no doubt possible that though 
nature and humanity are manifestations of 
God, they do not express his whole being, 
any more than our words are an exhaustive 
expression of our personality. Yet it is 
equally conceivable that God lias revealed 
his whole being, though man has yet read 



176 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



but part of the revelation. And in any 
case, we may be sure that the revelation, 
whether total or partial, is a true expres- 
sion of the divine nature. Hence we can- 
not follow Dr. Martineau in treating the 
cosmos which has come into being as but a 
sample of an unknown number that might 
have been. Such a plurality of cosmic 
possibilities he thinks necessary for the 
vindication of the ways of God, against 
those who complain of the arrangements 
of the present world, and attribute them to 
weakness, as though God could not have 
done otherwise. 

In short, this belief in a divine potency to 
realize an infinitude of possible universes is 
the opposite pole to J. S. Mill's suggestion 
of a beneficent but baffled designer of the 
world. But the motive to a philosophy, how- 
ever moving it may be, is no proof of the 
validity of that philosophy. And I cannot 
discover any theoretical ground for that no- 
tion of Some-transcendency which plays so 
large a part in Dr. Martineau's system of 
theism. Complete as is his break with de- 
ism, I cannot but regard this feature of his 
teaching as an unconscious survival from 
the deistic conception of God's relation to 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 177 



the universe. Of course, if God created the 
universe at a definite moment of time, he 
leads a transcendent life apart from it. 
And in imagining the process of creation, 
the deist naturally represented the divine 
builder as realizing, through his will, one 
of a number of ideas which floated before 
his mental vision. When, however, the 
world is regarded as an eternal act, as it is 
by Dr. Martineau, it becomes more diffi- 
cult, though perhaps not absolutely impos- 
sible, to preserve the analogy to a human 
artificer. We have not the same motive 
as before for emphasizing that selective 
will-function which we attribute to self- 
conscious beings who begin events. Of 
course this is no reason for conceiving 
God as devoid of will. But the divine 
will differs at least in two respects from 
the human. With God volition and reali- 
zation are one. And conflicting motives 
being absent from an all-wise being, the 
divine will functions with a perfection so 
absolute that, even to a spectator who be- 
lieved in freedom, it would have at least 
the appearance of determination. Our best 
analogy is not the perplexed and hesitat- 
ing mechanician, but the good man, who, 



178 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



by a kind of necessity of his character, can- 
not but will the virtuous acts which ex- 
press that character. Of course the good 
man has made this second nature by moral 
endeavor. But the fact remains that the 
perfection of human nature is reached only 
when will has become, as it were, second- 
arily automatic. 

Now, of all human volition, it is this that 
is likest God's. The divine will can express 
itself only as it does, because no other ex- 
pression would reveal what it is. Of such a 
will the eternal universe is the eternal reali- 
zation. If you cease to think of God under 
the deistic conception of creator, author, de- 
signer, or maker of the universe, you can 
justify his ways only by appeal to the move- 
ments of this universe, which are, in truth, 
his volitions ; for any primeval selection and 
realization of this cosmic scheme, in prefer- 
ence to others equally possible, you have 
not the slightest ground to assume. The 
world is not one of countless possible 
machines, as the mathematico-mechanical 
genius of the eighteenth century conceived 
it, but the organic expression, and the only 
real expression, of the life of an eternal 
and infinite spirit. To imagine its place 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 



179 



taken by another world is to imagine God 
other than he is. The possibility of a 
multitude of worlds is like the possibility 
of a multitude of gods. But a right 
thought of ultimate reality must recognize 
it as the primal ground of distinction be- 
tween the actual and the possible, — a dis- 
tinction, therefore, not applicable to that 
reality itself. 

As popular thought has turned the truth 
of a self-revealing spirit into the picture 
of an external creator of the world, so it 
has converted the fact of arrangement, 
especially noticeable in the realm of or- 
ganic life, into an argument for the exist- 
ence of a designer of the world. From 
the orderly arrangements and adaptations 
that appear an inference is made to a 
rational creative architect of the universe. 
In the history of philosophy this step ap- 
pears to have been first consciously taken 
by Anaxagoras. To him the beauty, har- 
mony, and design in the world seemed in- 
explicable save as the work of a rational, 
intending, and omnipotent intelligence or 
vov$. His predecessors inclined to material- 
ism or to hylozoism. But from this time 
onward designing mind remained a cosmic 



180 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



principle in the schools of Greek philos- 
ophy. Socrates is especially noteworthy 
for the prominence he gives to ends in the 
interpretation of nature, though he con- 
ceives them rather superficially and almost 
altogether in relation to human welfare as 
a final object. This anthropocentric tele- 
ology continued to flourish in the post- 
Aristotelian schools, and in the dogmatic 
theology of Christendom it was an essen- 
tial constituent. It was the natural coun- 
terpart of a geocentric astronomy, and both 
received their doom at the hand of Coper- 
nicus. So that at the present day we 
should all agree in the observation of 
Hegel that, though wine be useful to man, 
neither religion nor science is profited by 
supposing the cork-tree to exist for the 
sake of the corks which are cut from its 
bark to serve as stoppers for wine-bottles. 

Obviously from this class of adaptations 
to external ends, all of which are incidental 
results of the otherwise established con- 
stitution of natural objects and forces, no 
inference can be made to the character of 
the power that animates the universe. 
The modern teleologist, therefore, turns to 
adaptations to internal ends. These he 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 181 



finds, in living organisms, where the parts 
exist and act for the sake of the whole, 
by the idea of which they seem to be con- 
trolled. Here at any rate there appears 
to be indication of an aim in nature. Not 
that the teleologist regards the rest of the 
world as aimless. On the contrary, he is 
persuaded that the order of the whole cos- 
mos, which science is only beginning to 
reveal to us, is evidence of an intelligent 
cause. But the marks of intentionality are 
more obvious in the field of organic nature 
than elsewhere. The features of intend- 
ing will, nowhere absent, are especially 
discernible in the adaptations and adjust- 
ments of the parts and functions of living 
beings. And it is these select and con- 
spicuous instances that form the starting 
point of the so-called argument from design. 

This argument, under the designatioii of 
the physico-theological proof of the exist- 
ence of God won the respect, if not the 
assent, of the " all-destroying " Kant. Of 
all proofs to establish the existence of a 
Supreme Being, Kant pronounced it the 
oldest, the clearest, and the most conso- 
nant with human reason. And in spite 
of later attempts at improvement, his 



182 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



analysis of the argument is still perhaps 
the best that has ever been given. He 
enumerates four principal points. First, 
there are in the world clear indications 
of intentional arrangements, various and 
boundless. Secondly, these could not have 
originated spontaneously from the nature 
of things themselves, but only through 
means selected and arranged on purpose 
by a rational disposing principle, accord- 
ing' to certain fundamental ideas. Thirdly, 
there exists, therefore, a free, intelligent 
cause of the world. Fourthly, the unity 
of this cause may be inferred from the 
unity of the reciprocal relations of the 
parts of the world. 

Without inquiring at present into the 
inner connection and consistency of this 
argument, I may observe that it cannot 
get under way at all without affirming the 
presence of aims and intentions in the 
world. Intentionality we know from our 
own self-conscience experience. The tele- 
ological theist ought, therefore, to compare 
the works of nature with the purposive 
activity of man to discover whether they 
have the marks of intending thought. 
Given design, there must of course be a 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 183 

designer ; but that there is design any- 
where in the world nothing but the dis- 
covery of analogies to the intellectual pur- 
pose of man can make even probable. 

It was much easier in the eighteenth 
century than it is to-day to be persuaded 
of the presence of design in the universe. 
The growth of chemistry and biology has 
made impossible to us that mechanical view 
of nature which the physics of Galileo 
and Newton impressed indelibly upon the 
mind of earlier generations. Conceiving 
God as an extraneous maker of the world, 
they regarded living organisms as curiously 
wrought machines which, more than any 
other piece of the divine handiwork, 
showed the purposive activity of the great 
artificer. Indeed, the whole inanimate uni- 
verse, from the structure of the solar sys- 
tem to the fall of an apple, was accounted 
for by the inherent qualities of matter and 
the empirical laws of motion, so that in 
the field of cosmic infinitude God was 
needed only as original creator of unar- 
ranged materials. But for the science of 
that day living organisms were not amen- 
able to similar treatment. And not only 
did they demand a creator for their matter, 



184 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



but a designer for their balanced and har- 
monious forms. The arrangement of mat- 
ter in the inorganic world seemed natural 
and necessary; in the organic, supernatural 
and contingent. Here, therefore, reflec- 
tion found machines in which the divine 
artificer with wondrous skill and cunning 
had embodied plans and realized ends of 
transcendent intelligence. And this re- 
mains the view of the generality of man- 
kind until this day. 

But it is no longer so inevitable for the 
scientist. The scientific view of nature 
has been transformed by the recent discov- 
eries of the conservation of energy, of the 
dynamics of molecules, and of the cellular 
structure of organisms. Had the thinkers 
of the eighteenth century been aware of 
these later results in physics, chemistry, 
and biology, there can be little doubt they 
would have left us a purely mechanical 
or, at any rate, naturalistic account of or- 
ganic beings. This would have been quite 
conformable with their habitual mode of 
thought. But whether such expulsion of 
purpose from the organic sphere would 
have been justifiable is by no means so evi- 
dent. All that I am maintaining is the 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 



185 



greater difficulty of establishing the pres- 
ence of purpose in the world under the 
changed conditions of contemporary sci- 
ence. We have gained so much more 
knowledge of nature's operations that even 
the correlation of parts and functions in 
living organisms has no longer that unique 
unexplicableness that stamped it for earlier 
thinkers the special product of creative 
purpose. 

This explains why a philosophical the- 
ologian like Dr. Flint virtually abandons 
the argument from design. He misses the 
analogy between the works of nature and 
the products of art. The former, he says, 
disclose adaptations, but not purposes. An 
organism is defined as a systematic unity 
whose parts are definitely related to one 
another and co-ordinated to a common is- 
sue. In it we find an orderly arrangement. 
And it is the presence of order, not of pur- 
pose or intention, that justifies, according 
to Dr. Flint, our inference to a divine in- 
telligence. 

Still, we shall find it difficult to surren- 
der altogether our teleological view of the 
world. Though unable in perhaps the ma- 
jority of cases to assign ends to the nicely 



186 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



co-ordinated structures of living beings, we 
cannot but believe that they do actually 
realize ends preconceived by intelligence. 
Of course it must not be hastily assumed 
that every conspicuous property or function 
which we find in objects, is their intrinsic 
end. " That the property of rain is to wet, 
and fire to burn," is of interest only in the 
natural philosophy of Touchstone. Again, 
though conic sections are described by the 
movements of the planets, it would be rash 
to suppose such orbits were the final cause 
of their existence. On the other hand, it 
scarcely admits of doubt that the end of 
the eye is sight, and of the ear hearing. Of 
this kind is the abiding truth, as I think 
every candid person must concede, in the 
so-called argument from design. But this 
fact tells us nothing of the intelligence 
that had a preconception of the end. And 
for anything we can see to the contrary, it 
may be immanent in the original nature of 
the elements, or if it is external to them, it 
may have its seat in a plurality of creative 
spirits. There is much, therefore, wanting 
before a theistic structure can be reared on 
the teleological basis. Indeed, did we not 
already know from the cosmological argu- 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 187 



ment of the existence of one infinite spirit 
as ground of all existence, we should, I 
think, never become convinced of it by 
means of the argument from design. But 
given that belief in anthropocosmic theism, 
we readily find in the adaptations of or- 
ganisms the expression of an infinite self- 
conscious will and intelligence. 

Of course the case would be much worse 
were the reality of purpose in the world 
denied or explained away. The teleologist 
holds that living beings are conspicuous 
examples of the realization of an end, for 
the sake of which all their adjustments and 
adaptations originated. That end could be 
conceived only by an intelligence. But as 
the animal's organs are ready-made gifts 
of nature, and its instincts original endow- 
ments, intelligence, it is held, works through 
it as a medium rather than in it as a sub- 
ject. Organisms do not shape themselves 
by self-conscious reflection ; and yet they 
are the embodiment of reason. It is this 
circumstance that justifies their comparison 
with works of art, and, in spite of many 
dissimilarities, suggests the inference to 
an organizing intelligence. But manifestly 
this inference would be supererogatory, if 



188 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



it were thinkable that ends might be real- 
ized in the organic world without any 
preconception of them. In the products 
of human skill the idea always goes before 
and guides the movements of the hand. 
And as our own causation is the only one 
we know immediately, and know on the 
inner as well as on the outer side, we 
have taken it as a universal type, and 
supposed with Aristotle that without an 
idea there could be no action directed 
upon an end. And as the idea was not to 
be found in the living organisms them- 
selves, it was naturally located in a su- 
preme intelligence that worked through 
them. But the modern philosophy of un- 
consciousness would change all that. It 
sets out, not with self-conscious intelligence 
which is nearest and best known, but with 
animal instincts which are earlier, more 
distant, and more opaque. Because there 
is no intention on the part of the animal 
that follows its instincts, it is assumed that 
nature, working blindly, may realize ends. 
This universal mode of operation comes in 
man to the light of consciousness. Man 
knows that he realizes ends ; but, according 
to Schopenhauer, the end also operates as 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 189 



a motive on a being that knows it not. 
Nor is this paradox relieved by Hartmann's 
motiving the will with an unconscious idea. 
The contradiction remains, that ends un- 
conceived should ever become motives for 
their own appropriate realization. To hu- 
man understanding this is simply unin- 
telligible. It asserts and denies in the 
same breath. Whether or not there be 
purpose in the world, no end can exercise 
an influence on its own realization unless 
it be actually present to an intelligence. 

The philosophy of unconsciousness is of 
course pledged to the ejection of a conscious 
intelligence from nature. That it should, 
however, cleave so tenaciously to ends, of 
which that intelligence alone is the condi- 
tion, is a remarkable testimony to the 
strength of our natural conviction of the 
presence of purpose in the world. Unfor- 
tunately this ineradicable belief in design, 
this rejection of a purposeless universe, has 
been associated in the popular mind with 
certain theories regarding the realization 
of purpose, which modern science has ren- 
dered obsolete. The ordinary teleologist 
deems himself under obligation to set an 
impassable barrier between the inorganic 



190 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



and the organic world. So that in the 
legitimate inquiry of science for a natural 
origin and development of living organisms 
he sees something antagonistic to his 
belief in design. Just as the plain man 
wants a God who is separate in space and 
time, in essence and action from the only 
reality he knows anything about, so his 
faith in the intentionality of things would 
be surer if the field of organic nature were 
hedged about and separated from the inor- 
ganic, and the natural law that reigns 
inexorably in the latter held only dubious 
and accommodating sway in the former. 
Perhaps it is not too much to say that the 
generality of mankind emphasize the won- 
derful and unaccountable constitution of 
living organisms rather than the end or 
purpose it embodies. For this makes the 
postulate of a wonder-working creator all 
the more necessary. Thus beside the ma- 
terial wT>rld with its natural processes, 
conceived of vaguely as once non-existent 
though now self-subsistent, popular thought 
sets up a second principle as supernatural 
and ever-active ground of living beings 
which it mysteriously produces or creates. 
This conception of the argument from 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 191 

design has been outgrown by modern views 
of nature and irrevocably shattered by 
Darwinian biology. The scientist no 
longer believes in external interference 
with the order of nature. The formation 
of living organisms must be explained by 
processes as purely natural as the occur- 
rences of the physical world. It is true 
that this ideal is as yet unrealized in the 
case of the first germs of life. But there 
is nothing absurd in the supposition that 
these should one day be derived from the 
elements of the material world. And, 
however that may be, the growth of germs 
can already be understood as a physico- 
chemical process. Hence even if conscious 
design is operative in the organic world, it 
realizes its ends in accordance with those 
laws of mechanism which in the popular 
estimation are exclusive of design. An 
end would be for us as good as non- 
existent which could not express itself 
through the regular sequences and co- 
existences of the natural world. And an 
end so expressing itself must be regarded 
as the necessary product of c-ausal con- 
nections. It is not, as popular thought 
puts it, that an external designer brings 



192 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



together at any given moment the means 
necessary for the realization of the end ; 
but from moment to moment the status of 
the natural world as a whole and in every 
detail is precisely what it is determined 
to be by the condition of its own inherent 
powers and agencies. If, therefore, in the 
organic world ends are realized, as we 
believe they are, the ground must be sought 
not outside the realm of natural law, but 
within it — or rather in an intelligence 
whose purpose is expressed through the 
medium of natural law. In a word, the 
teleology of to-day must be perfectly com- 
patible with the scientific postulate of 
universal and invariable causality. 

It is at this point that the Darwinian 
theory of natural selection has come into 
such violent conflict with the popular view 
of design. Darwin maintained there was 
a natural cause for the development of 
life with all its organs, functions, and in- 
stincts ; and that in any given case the 
finished organ, function, instinct, or entire 
organism was only one surviving form out 
of many possible forms, and owed its pre- 
dominance over them to the greater bene- 
fits, as regards food, protection, and the 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 



193 



like, which it ensured to its survivor in 
the universal struggle for existence. The 
Darwinian view is no doubt destructive 
of the ordinary conception of design. In 
bringing the whole organic field under the 
rule of natural law it has taken a step 
which most teleologists still hesitate to 
follow. And in substituting for specially 
designed and sudden creations the idea 
of slowly differentiating organisms between 
which struggle for life is the only arbiter, 
it shocks common sense with the sugges- 
tion alike of a chance government of the 
world and of a reckless prodigality of 
material in the attainment of its final con- 
figuration. But no theory can gainsay this 
apparent wastefulness of life with the facts 
of biology before our eyes. And what is 
here called chance is really causation, but 
causation meandering through obscure and 
mazy paths where we had supposed that 
the direct way was the only possible line 
of advance. But it would be a mistake to 
regard Darwinism as a refutation of the 
doctrine of ends in nature. It is merely 
the refutation of a particular theory, 
though a venerable one, regarding the 
mode in which ends are realized in the 



194 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



organic world. No doubt for the great 
majority who are unable to distinguish 
between the accidents and the essence of 
teleology, the collapse of the older biology 
is synonymous with the doom of the argu- 
ment from design. But sober reflection 
will convince us that it only changes the 
location and mode of realizing ends. If 
everything in the universe were derived 
according to natural laws from a primordial 
arrangement of elements, Ave might be 
surprised that things had developed in one 
way rather than in another, but we could, 
nevertheless, entertain no doubt that if 
intention were manifest in the issue, it 
must already have been present at the 
beginning. And by a wonderful forecast 
of genius, Paley virtually accepted the 
modern theory of evolution. 

" Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant 
thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." 
The eye has supplied the teleologist with 
more examples of intention than any other 
organ. Suppose now that Darwin is correct 
in assuming that natural selection, by a 
successive consolidation of favorable varia- 
tions, has converted the simple apparatus 
of an optic nerve, coated with pigment and 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 



195 



invested by transparent membrane, into 
the perfect human eye with its nerves and 
muscles, its lenses and humors, its retina 
and coatings, and all its innumerable con- 
trivances for perfect adaptation to the 
function of seeing. Is then the eye the 
realization of no divine idea? Rather is 
not all this mechanism of variations, strug- 
gles, and inheritances in the organic world, 
which awaited so long the interpretation 
of Darwin, merely the preordained means 
for the realization of ideas eternally present 
to the supreme intelligence and in a manner 
already prefigured in the lowest germs of 
life from which otherwise they could never 
have been developed into actuality ? Divine 
intention does not become an accidental 
result when you have described its manner 
of working, however surprising that manner 
may be. 

It will be interesting and instructive to 
study Darwin's own views of the bearing 
of natural selection upon the teleological 
conception of the world. In his systematic 
works there is not infrequent allusion to 
the subject, but in the delightful volumes 
of Life and Letters recently given to the 
public, we have the inmost confessions of 



196 



BELIEF IX GOD. 



a candid soul, unbaring itself to the view 
of trusted friends. Readers of Macaulay's 
biography will recall his remark that, if 
Clarissa Harloive had been lost, he and 
his sisters could have reproduced it from 
memory. It was not a novel, but a classic 
treatise on teleology, that left a similarly 
indelible impress upon the mind of Macau- 
lay's great scientific contemporary. On 
November 15, 1859, Darwin wrote to Sir 
John Lubbock : " I do not think I hardly 
ever admired a book more than Paley's 
' Natural Theologj^.' I could almost for- 
merly have said it by heart." That Paley's 
argument from design in nature was, how- 
ever, invalidated by the discovery of nat- 
ural selection, Darwin firmly believed. 
Nevertheless he refused to regard the uni- 
verse as the product of blind necessity ; 
but a satisfactory setting for his teleology 
in relation to his science he was never able 
to achieve. His attitude is best indicated 
in the correspondence with Asa Gray. 
Writing on May 22, 1860, he said: "I 
cannot anyhow be contented to view this 
wonderful universe, and especially the na- 
ture of man, and to conclude that every- 
thing is the result of brute force. I am 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 



197 



inclined to look at everything as result- 
ing from designed laws, with the details, 
whether good or bad, left to the working 
out of what we may call chance. Not that 
this notion at all satisfies me." And again, 
on June 5, 1861 : " I have been led to think 
more on this subject of late, and grieve 
to say that I come to differ more from j^ou. 
It is not that designed variation makes, as 
it seems to me, my deity, 'natural selec- 
tion,' superfluous ; but rather from studying 
lately domestic variation, and seeing what 
an enormous field of undesigned variability 
there is ready for natural selection to ap- 
propriate for any purpose useful to each 
creature." And shortly after, on Septem- 
ber 17, this answer to Gray's question what 
would convince him of design : " If I saw 
an angel come down to teach us good, and 
I was convinced from others seeing him 
that I was not mad, I should believe in 
design. If I could be convinced thoroughly 
that life and mind was, in an unknown 
way, a function of other imponderable 
force, I should be convinced. If man was 
made of brass or iron, and no way con- 
nected with any other organism which had 
ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced/* 



198 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



In the short but pathetic chapter on 
" Religion," the editor has brought to- 
gether a number of Darwin's deliverances 
on the subject of design, especially in rela- 
tion to the teleological argument for the 
existence of God. " In my most extreme 
fluctuations," he wrote, as late as 1879, "I 
have never been an atheist, in the sense of 
denying the existence of a God." He 
explicitly states what ought never to have 
been doubted, that the theory of evolution 
is " quite compatible with the belief in a 
God." And to several correspondents he 
repeats in substance what he wrote to a 
Dutch student in 1873 : " The impossibility 
of conceiving that this grand and wondrous 
universe, with our conscious selves, arose 
through chance, seems to me the chief 
argument for the existence of God." It is 
true he is always haunted by the doubt 
that this argument may not be valid. To 
the Duke of Argyle's remark that some of 
the Darwinian writings themselves brought 
to light the obvious workings of mind in 
nature, he replied, " Well, that often comes 
over me with overwhelming force, but at 
other times," and he shook his head 
vaguely, " it seems to go away." Perhaps 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 199 



his habitual mode of thought is most com- 
pletely and precisely expressed in the fol- 
lowing sentence from a letter to Miss 
Wedgwood: u The mind refuses to look 
at this universe, being what it is, with- 
out having been designed ; yet, where one 
would most expect design, viz. in the 
structure of a sentient being, the more I 
think on the subject, the less I can see 
proof of design." 

This is the heart of Darwin's teleological 
problem. He conceived that natural selec- 
tion could produce the most exquisite struc- 
tures, if attainable through gradations, as 
he knew in general they were ; and finding 
nothing of design in the action of natural 
selection, which is simply struggle for life 
and survival of the fittest, he had no place 
for design in the organic world, where, if 
anywhere, it ought to have been present. 
But what of those variations which are 
the material upon which natural selection 
works? That they too were undesigned 
Darwin convinced himself by a very strik- 
ing argument. If we are not to believe 
that the forms are preordained of the 
broken fragments of rock tumbled from 
a precipice, which are fitted together by 



200 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



man to build his house, why should we 
believe that the variations of domestic ani- 
mals or plants are preordained for the sake 
of the breeds ? And if Providence did not 
design for man's amusement those varia- 
tions in the rock pigeon, out of which man 
has yet made by his own selective accumu- 
lation the pouter or the fan-tail pigeon, 
why should it be imagined that the varia- 
tions by which, through the action of 
natural selection, the beautifully adapted 
woodpecker has been formed, were provi- 
dentially designed? Broken stones are not 
produced by nature in order that men may 
build houses out of them. Peculiarities 
of domestic animals are not produced by 
nature in order that breeders may consoli- 
date them into new varieties. Why, then, 
are variations in living beings held to 
be designed, when, through the selective 
action of the struggle for life, those best 
adapted to the environment are consoli- 
dated and perpetuated in new forms ? If 
the principle of design is given up in the 
one case, Darwin's conviction was that 
there was no shadow of reason for retain- 
ing it in the other ; and to Asa Gray, who 
believed in designed variations, he wrote 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 201 



(November 26, 1860): "I cannot believe 
this ; and I think you would have to believe 
that the tail of the fan-tail was led to vary 
in the number and direction of its feathers 
in order to gratify the caprice of a few 
men." To the same effect he writes (April, 
1860) to Lyell about the crop of the pouter, 
which pigeon-fanciers have produced : " It 
seems preposterous that a maker of a uni- 
verse should care about the crop of a 
pigeon, solely to please man's silly fancies. 
But if you agree with me in thinking such 
an interposition of the Deity uncalled for, 
I can see no reason whatever for believing 
in such interpositions in the case of natural 
beings, in which strange and admirable 
peculiarities have been naturally selected 
for the creature's own benefit." 

Forcible as this reasoning is — and Dar- 
win wrote in his autobiography, in 1876, 
that he had never seen it answered — I 
cannot but think it gains much of its 
plausibility from a confusion between in- 
trinsic and extrinsic ends. It must be 
freely acknowledged that neither the 
stones are there for the sake of the house- 
builder nor the extra tail-feathers for the 
sake of the pigeon-fancier. But being 



202 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



there, they may be utilized for human ends, 
and that whether, considered in themselves, 
they are purposive or purposeless. But 
that men can accomplish their designs by 
means of existing objects, with properties 
and activities of their own, is a matter of 
course, and proves nothing further, cer- 
tainly not the absence of ends inherent in 
the nature of those things which also hap- 
pen to be serviceable to the plans of men. 
The intentionality that looks through the 
eye is not affected by the accidental cir- 
cumstance that breeders may consolidate 
chance ocular peculiarities into some fixed 
habit. That is man's design, a design su- 
perimposed upon the realized end of na- 
ture. But suppose it is shown that the 
eye itself is the surviving summation of 
a series of variations of that sort, what 
then ? I should answer that as the varia- 
tions, after sifting through natural selec- 
tion, have produced the eye, without 
interference on the part of man, it may be 
supposed their preordained goal. And as 
I find it impossible to believe that a blindly 
working nature should realize ends of 
which it has no knowledge, I conclude 
there is an intelligence working through 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 203 

nature, with a preconception of this idea, 
just as it is the intelligence of the fancier, 
with his antecedent idea of a pouter or 
fantail, that enables him to utilize the 
means for calling them into existence. I 
admit that the means by which nature's 
designs are realized appear to us, under 
the Darwinian theory, to partake of waste- 
ful and ridiculous excess. But it should 
be remembered that in the life of the eter- 
nal spirit, in whom and through whom are 
all beings, the forms that are quenched 
in the struggle for existence may fulfil 
ends just as truly as the more successful 
forms that gain a somewhat longer history. 

There are ends everywhere in nature. 
We are not always able to describe them 
with so much certainty as in the case of 
the eye. These ends shape the nature and 
course of the variations — though through 
causal connections — out of which organ- 
isms and organs are consolidated. Over 
and above their own immanent ends, 
organisms also lend themselves to the 
extrinsic designs of man. These proposi- 
tions, which seem to me to describe a tena- 
ble system of teleology in its relation to 
the Darwinian theory of natural selection, 



204 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



are not in a single instance in conflict with 
that theory, or with the facts of conscious 
selection on the part of agriculturists and 
horticulturists. By this system it will be 
seen that the location of design is carried 
back from the existing to the earliest or- 
ganisms and their variations ; or if you 
choose to make a leap that science cannot 
yet take, to the molecular constitution of 
the so-called inorganic world. Here, in 
fact, with unerring instinct the most phil- 
osophical follower of Darwin has already 
domiciled it, though without recognition of 
the spirituality of that primordial reality 
to which must belong the purposes realized 
in the course of evolution. If without 
going so far we stop at the primitive germs 
of life, must we not think of them as en- 
dowed with a constitution capable of varia- 
tion only along certain preordained lines of 
development? Such, at any rate, is the 
view of Professor Huxley. And from 
Darwin's own standpoint it seems to me 
the conception of design in the organic 
world should not have been thrown over 
until he had found an answer to that co- 
nundrum which on November 25, 1859, he 
somewhat profanely propounded to Mr. 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 205 

Huxley. "You have," he says, "most 
cleverly hit on one point which has greatly 
troubled me ; if, as I must think, external 
conditions produce little direct effect, what 
the devil determines each particular varia- 
tion? What makes a tuft of feathers 
come on a cock's head, or moss on a moss- 
rose ? " Until that query is answered, the 
proof that the eye has " come " by way of 
natural selection instead of having been 
" specially made," is no proof that its com- 
ing was unintentional. And when the 
query is answered, it will be seen that 
though we have in the eye a result which 
is brought about only in accordance with 
the inexorable laws of causation, it is a re- 
sult that cannot be exhaustively explained 
on a merely mechanical or blind necessita- 
rian theory of the universe. 

Development does not negate design ; it 
rather affirms it. When we say that any- 
thing develops, we mean that it undergoes 
changes which occur in a determinate man- 
ner and lead towards a definite end. Of 
this law of its development the organism 
is itself not aware. Nor can it have re- 
ceived the law from other individual be- 
ings, which are all in the same position. 



206 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



To understand evolution, therefore, we 
must, as in the similar case of causation, 
trace it back to the real ground of the uni- 
verse itself. And as causation proved to 
be immanent changes, self-determined and 
compensatory, in the life of the one abso- 
lute spirit, so in a last analysis evolution 
signifies besides such causation the self- 
posited order of divine ideas in accordance 
with which these changes actually occur. 
In their relation to his will these ideas of 
the Infinite Spirit must be regarded as ends. 
Man sees the causal mechanism by which 
they are realized, but to discern the ideas 
themselves is generally beyond his power. 
In the organic world he catches glimpses 
of them. And in the life of the human 
spirit they confront him in a self-con- 
scious miniature. 

But it is nature that brings to the birth 
not only living organisms, but also self- 
conscious minds. Yet they seem beyond 
the trick of nature as we have ordinarily 
understood her. Should some Polixenes 
remind us that 

" Even that art 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes " — 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 207 

we shall not quarrel about names. But 
since what life and mind add to the world 
is something that mere blind mechanism 
could not of itself have produced, we are 
forced to see in nature a spiritual ground 
which, with an absolute self-consciousness 
of its own, may yet be said to sleep in the 
stone, dream in the animal, and again wake 
to life in man. The universe is a realized 
scheme of divine ideas ; but, though they 
emerge to sight in organisms, we should 
never have suspected their presence but 
for our own self-conscious spirits, which 
are the chiefest product, and therefore the 
best interpretation, of the ultimate ground 
of things. Now as science cannot dispense 
with mechanical causes, neither can our 
own spirit, which originates science, allow 
us to regard the world as only mechanical. 
Darwin shows that if the idea of purpose 
be retained, we must not allow the arrange- 
ments of particular things to be made by a 
will external to them, since they can all be 
accounted for by means of causal actions 
and reactions. What remains, then, is to 
unite with causality a principle of immanent 
teleology. And this union, as it does not 
violate any of the postulates or facts of 



208 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



science, is absolutely necessary for the in- 
terpretation of nature as the actual source 
of life and self-conscious intelligence. That 
such a synthesis of causality and teleology 
has already been made by many philosoph- 
ical scientists, there seems good reason 
to believe. But so great is the current 
prejudice in scientific circles against spirit 
that, though reflection will convince any 
one that spirit is the only possible ground 
of this synthesis, these scientists continue 
to talk in materialistic language of a pri- 
mordial molecular arrangement as the ulti- 
mate principle of their philosophy. For 
our own part, we must state explicitly our 
belief in the existence of one absolute 
spirit, of which all finite beings are the 
members or functions. And as the reality 
of finite things is but a mode of divine 
activity, so their development according to 
law and purpose is but the conformity of 
the divine will to ideas of the divine rea- 
son. In a last analysis cosmic force and 
intentionality alike converge in God. 

It was precisely such a metaphysic that 
Darwin needed for escape from the haunt- 
ing doubt of the reality of design in nature. 
" If I could be convinced thoroughly," he 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 209 



said, in words already quoted, " that life 
and mind was in an unknown way a func- 
tion of other imponderable force, I should 
be convinced." The real ground of doubt, 
you see, lies in the implied assumption that 
life and mind are the mere fortuitous prod- 
ucts of a blind arrangement of material 
elements. But from such an unconscious 
materialism philosophical reflection is able 
to deliver us. And a sound metaphysic 
will show the very thing that Darwin de- 
siderated, namely, that life and mind, and 
not only life and mind, but matter too, are 
functions of other imponderable force, of 
an absolute spiritual life in which all 
things have the root of their reality. 

But while the teleological path may be 
thus made plain for those whose philoso- 
phy has already assured them of the exist- 
ence of God, it is quite another question 
whether in itself it would conduct the 
doubt-driven wanderer to that primal 
ground of reality and truth. The difficulty 
is in establishing empirically the universal 
presence of design. How few are the 
cases in which we can find an intrinsic 
end and a combination of appropriate 
means for its realization ! And even when 



210 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



we seem to succeed, as for example in the 
development of plants, how seldom are the 
ends realized anything of absolute worth ! 
The entire existence of plants is to them- 
selves a matter of indifference, constructed 
though they obviously are with reference 
to the continuation of their kind. They 
subserve, it is true, the extrinsic end of 
maintaining sentient life, since, whatever 
be the intermediary chemical processes, all 
animal tribes ultimately depend for food 
upon vegetation. But that only provokes 
the further question, What, then, is the 
absolute value of animal existence? Man 
is the paragon of animals. And in man we 
feel there is something of absolute worth. 
But can we make this quintessence of dust 
the ultimate end of all existence ? Does 
not anthropocentric teleology miss that 
true cosmic perspective which comes of 
remembering that the chief end of man, as 
of all finite things, is to glorify God ? 

But it is not merely that the ends we 
discern are few and comparatively unim- 
portant. It is not merely that in the great 
majority of cases there seems to be a fail- 
ure of ends. Worse than all, our picked 
instances of intentionality are largely neu- 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 211 



tralizecl by nature's crop of misadjustment, 
uselessness, mischief, and disease. I do 
not mean that if we were quite certain of 
purposive activity in the favorable cases, 
we should yield that certainty when sur- 
rounded by so many exceptions of a con- 
trary sort. But I mean that one who 
looked impartially at nature, on the fair 
side and on the foul, might on the whole 
doubt whether a principle of irrationality 
or blind chance might not as easily have 
produced certain semblances of design as 
an infinite reason and goodness that wealth 
of opposite instances. 

This disaffection towards Nature is the 
inevitable result of endeavoring to read 
in her modes of behavior the impenetrable 
secrets of divine purpose We know from 
our analysis of reality that there must be 
an infinite spirit, with self-consciousness 
and will. We know, therefore, there must 
be purpose and intention in the world, 
though it is scarcely given to us to dis- 
cover it by observation. Yet though veri- 
fying vision fails, this is only what might 
have been expected from the nature of the 
case. And on no account, if we are to 
interpret the universe by a single prin- 



212 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



ciple, as science, philosophy, and theology 
alike demand, can we forego our hypothe- 
sis of anthropocosmic theism. 

But of this belief in God the argument 
from design, strictly estimated, could never 
supply the evidence. Its kernel of truth 
lies in the perception that the interpreta- 
tion of the material is to be sought for in 
the living and the conscious, and that life 
and consciousness, though realizing them- 
selves through mechanism, could not have 
been produced by it, and must indeed be 
considered functions of one all-embracing 
spirit. But when this truth assumes the 
form of a demonstration of the divine ex- 
istence from the presence of design in the 
processes of nature, two defects appear in 
the argument, either of which is sufficient 
to break it. First, while the designed 
arrangements found in the world neces- 
sarily imply intelligence, it may be imma- 
nent in the organisms that exhibit its 
marks, or, since in some cases that cannot 
be the case, it may be found in a plurality 
of external creators. And this last as- 
sumption really accords well with the facts 
of the case. For, in the second place, the 
universality of design cannot, as we have 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 213 



seen, be established by empirical observa- 
tion. And the things that are designed 
may be set over against the things that are 
undesigned, and each sphere assigned, as 
in the Persian mythology, to one of two 
opposite creative principles. That this 
logically valid procedure is not generally 
thought of is due to the fact that those 
who use the argument from design are 
already convinced of the existence of God. 
They unconsciously shut their eyes to the 
instances of misadjustment and purpose- 
lessness. As in the temples were hung 
the votive offerings of those only who had 
escaped drowning, so in the argument from 
design it is rare to find any display of con- 
trary facts. It is, as Bacon observed, the 
vice of the human mind to neglect nega- 
tive instances. And that the argument 
from design fails at least to give them their 
due weight, we may realize if we put our- 
selves in the position of the sceptic, and 
inquire how we could overcome to his 
satisfaction the objections I have just 
urged against the conclusiveness of the 
teleological proof for the existence of God, 
as that proof is ordinarily understood. 
Yet the fact remains that thought cannot 



214 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



surrender the teleological view of the world. 
That existence has a meaning and a pur- 
pose is as certain to us as that existence is. 
Now, the supreme end of all things must be 
what theologians call the gioiy of God — 
the one absolute reality. But God glorifies 
himself in communicating himself. Hence 
we may say, with Plato and with Jonathan 
Edwards, the one last end of all things is 
that the infinite good might be communica- 
ted. But the Universal Spirit can reveal 
himself only in and through individual spir- 
its, who have the power to know him and 
the capacity to enjoy him. And since we 
know of no other finite spirit than man, we 
may venture the inference, bold though it 
is, that man is indispensable for the attain- 
ment of God's glory. Thus man becomes 
implicated with the final cause of all crea- 
tion. And here we have an answer to the 
question concerning anthropocentric teleol- 
ogy raised a few pages back. In its vulgar 
form that doctrine has been dislocated by 
the sciences, especially the heliocentric as- 
tronomy. But in its deepest thought, it has 
been reinstated by that theory of evolution 
which forms the culminating point of mod- 
ern science. If man is no longer the spatial 



AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 215 

centre of a universe that dances attendance 
upon him, he is the latest offspring of time 
in a universe that for vast geologic ages 
has groaned and travailed together with 
his birth. As Aristotle rightly saw, the 
end of nature is the production of man. 
All things are his. And unless the evolu- 
tionist's analogy between the course of the 
world and the growth of an organism is 
misleading, all things, in a certain sense, 
are for his sake. We cannot for a moment 
believe that man is merely an incident in 
a blind rush of mechanical changes. On 
the other hand, we do not, even in the case 
of man, expect to find the realization of a 
final purpose without causal connections. 
But it is certainly a very suggestive fact, 
as Darwin, but especially Wallace, has 
pointed out, that natural selection, which 
is the moving power of the organic world, 
and which was an active agent in the pro- 
duction of our species, ceases to operate in 
man, whose development goes on by means 
of self-conscious deliberation, choice, and 
effort. Man is to throw off his brutish 
heritage, and press on towards perfect life 
by his own free agency. And the goal of 
his endeavor is the actualization of those 



216 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



spiritual potencies with which he feels him- 
self charged. In the words of Pythagoras, 
man's aim is to be like God. In this God- 
likeness there is a communion with God, 
which is man's response to the ultimate 
end of all creation, — the communication 
of the goodness of God. 

Here, tlien, along with the general doc- 
trine of purpose, we have a specifically an- 
thropic teleology. God has crowned man 
with glory and honor. Whether we vis- 
ualize his regal position as the centre of 
cosmic space or the climax of cosmic time, 
the fact remains that the human spirit is 
the organ of that communication of God 
which is the end of the universe. 

The nature of the communion between 
the Infinite and the finite spirit must be 
reserved for the following lecture. 



LECTURE VI. 



BELIEF IN GOD AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 

So far the hypothesis of the existence 
of one infinite spirit has presented itself 
as a philosophical principle for the expla- 
nation of the universe as a whole. We were 
led to it, you will remember, by an analy- 
sis of the fact of becoming or change. Or, 
more particularly, we found it impossible 
to understand how things should act upon 
one another, if, as is ordinarily supposed, 
they are in reality independent of one- 
another. The fact of reciprocal action of 
things being given, however, there was no 
alternative but to regard things as func- 
tions of one all-inclusive reality which, 
while remaining identical with itself, yet 
underwent immanent changes in its states. 
And this postulate our own self-conscious 
experience enabled us to satisfy in deter- 
mining the ground of all existence as 
spiritual. Ultimate reality, we said, must 

217 



218 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



know itself as one amid the multiplicity 
of its states. And as the source of changes 
in itself, this reality, we did not hesitate 
to declare, must be volitional as well as 
self-conscious. The infinite spirit is no 
mere sabbatic observer of changes that 
occur in the universe ; it is itself the pro- 
ductive ground of them, and they are its 
states and apart from it have no existence. 
In the externalization of this spirit through 
what we call the material world, there 
must of course be marks of purpose. But 
it is so seldom human vision can discern 
them that were we confined to the empiri- 
cal argument from design, there would be 
some excuse, at least in mutinous and atra- 
bilious moods, for treating it as a disproof 
rather than a proof of the existence of 
God. Yet it by no means follows, as so 
many thinkers have hastily concluded, that 
modern science and Darwinism in partic- 
ular oblige us to conceive the universe in 
its entirety and in all its details as the 
product of a blindly working mechanical 
necessity. For in that universe we find 
life and mind. And though science should 
ultimately succeed in reducing them to 
their material conditions, — a prospect that 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 219 

is to-day only a dim expectancy, — their 
peculiar content and significance would 
not thereby be accounted for, and we should 
simply be constrained to re-interpret in 
other than material language the primor- 
dial elements which were capable of blos- 
soming and ripening, under the fixed laws 
of mechanism, into the flower and fruit 
of living self-conscious spirit. Hence that 
teleological view of the world required by 
the results of our previous metaphysical 
analysis cannot be disannulled by science, 
either as science now stands or might ever 
conceivably stand in the future. As cos- 
mic principle, therefore, the hypothesis of 
an infinite self-conscious and volitional 
being appears to stand on a quite solid 
basis. 

Even this belief in God is anthropic as 
well as cosmic in its character. For if the 
universe as a whole supplies the facts for 
the explanation of which this hypothesis 
was needed, it is from man alone we bor- 
row the content of the hypothesis. The 
self-conscious essence that is at home with 
us in the human microcosm we see to be 
the interpretative principle of the all-em- 
bracing macrocosm. But there is a second 



220 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



sense in which this theism deserves to be 
called anthropic. Over and above the cos- 
mic facts on which we have based the exist- 
ence of God as a metaphysical being there 
are specifically human facts that shape 
and color the conception thus generically 
established. God is not merely the ground 
of all things. Not that I would disparage 
for a moment a metaphysical result short 
of which the comprehending intellect of 
man can never rest satisfied. But as the 
chief end of man is not knowledge, or, to 
express it more cautiously, as man is more 
than a knowing intelligence, so his interest 
in God must go much farther than the 
conception of Him as an ultimate princi- 
ple for the interpretation of all existence. 
For our understanding of the universe, 
and for the universe itself so far as it is 
not spiritual, no other determination of the 
divine nature is necessary. But the com- 
plex nature of man forces us to consider 
other predicates of God. For man has a 
heart and a soul as well as a mind. And 
a conception of God that satisfies merely 
the intellect may crush the emotions and 
aspirations, paralyze the will, and tear 
from conscience aft that is precious, en- 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 221 

nobling, and supremely worthful in the 
life of humanity. That such ruthless in- 
tellectual tyranny is now the fashion in 
circles of higher thought I would neither 
conceal from myself nor from you. But 
the suggestion may be ventured that after 
all what is true in these matters must ap- 
prove itself true to the whole man. Only 
the intellect, it is true, can trace the modes 
of procedure of reality, as science records 
them. But in determining the nature of 
reality itself, the whole being of man, 
which is the only part of reality we know 
immediately from the inside must be 
allowed to appear as witness. Whoever 
treats himself as the evanescent and worth- 
less product of blind mechanical motions 
and percussions may of course reach a 
more or less consistent theory of the uni- 
verse, but he has purchased it in violation 
of all the clearest rights and claims of 
personality. The question really is whether 
for the sake of completely realizing the 
scientific ideal of explaining everything by 
determinable mechanical processes, the self 
in whom and for whom and through whom 
all this scientific knowledge exists should 
itself be brought down to the level of the 



222 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



categories through which it explains the 
world of objects ; so that whatever spirit- 
ual content resisted such reduction should 
be declared illusory surplusage even though 
it included the beautiful and the good, the 
belief in freedom, and the hope of im- 
mortality. It is from its notion of the 
self, the inevitable centre of everybody's 
world, that every system of philosophy 
takes its origin and tone. And the mechan- 
ical philosophy will always be found irre- 
fragable by the man who, as Schelling 
somewhere says, is himself able to realize 
it in practice; that is, who does not find 
unendurable the thought of working away 
at his own annihilation, surrendering the 
freedom of the will, and being merely the 
modification of a blind object in whose in- 
finitude he finds sooner, or later his own 
ethical destruction. Of course appeals to 
sentiment and prejudice would here be out 
of place. But the soberest reflection, I 
may be permitted to say, makes it impos- 
sible for me to accept this view of person- 
ality. Nor can I see any ground for it 
except an unreasoning prejudice in favor, 
exclusively, of the methods of objective 
science and a resolute determination to 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 



223 



carry them into the life of spirit (itself 
the author of all science) even though the 
first condition of success be the denial of 
everything that is essentially characteristic 
of spirit. Much as I admire the achieve- 
ments of the scientific intellect, it is 

" Not for these I raise 

The song of thanks and praise ; 
But for those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
Blank misgivings of a Creature 
Moving about in worlds not realised, 
High instincts, before which our mortal Nature 
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised : 
But for those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing; 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal Silence : truths that wake, 

To perish never ; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 

Nor Man nor Boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
Can utterly abolish or destroy ! " 

Now, if this priceless heritage of person- 
ality, these pure affections, high instincts, 
supersensuous cravings, and deop-seeing 



224 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



intuitions, are to be kept inviolate, as they 
must be if we believe them to have an 
absolute worth, adequate provision must 
be made for them in any philosophy that 
is to approve itself true to the entire nature 
of man. Reality is vastly richer than human 
thought can compass. And speculation that 
escapes superficiality is almost certain to 
fall into the opposite vice of one-sidedness. 
There are more things, if not in the heavens 
and on the earth, assuredly in the self-con- 
scious life of man, than are dreamt of in 
the mechanical philosophy ; and if it is 
awakened to their presence, it can only 
explain them as illusions that accompany 
the functioning of those natural forces 
which it regards as sole reality. Person- 
ality is the rock on which such naturalistic 
theories always suffer shipwreck. We can- 
not believe ourselves to be the incidental 
and evanescent appearances they would 
make us. And for this reason, too, pan- 
theism is an unsatisfactory philosophy. 
However superior to the mechanical the- 
ory in its conception of ultimate reality, in 
determining the relation of God to finite 
beings, it leaves no room for human per- 
sonality. On this crucial point we must 



AS FA THKR OF SPIRITS. 225 



examine also how the case stands with 
anthropocosmic theism. 

We have held that the one eternal and 
ultimate reality is the absolute life of God. 
As self-conscious and volitional, we desig- 
nate it spiritual life. Now, it is the nature 
of spirit to manifest itself. The material 
world, accordingly, we regard as the expres- 
sion of the divine will. It is not, as the 
deist supposed, an instituted system of once 
created, though now self-subsisting reali- 
ties, which might, as it were, go on to 
exist, though God should cease to be. It 
is the continuous efflux of the divine en- 
ergy, and apart from God has absolutely 
no existence. Material things exist simply 
as modes of the divine activity ; they have 
no existence for themselves. Spiritual 
things, on the other hand, exist at once in 
God and for themselves. They are in God ; 
for as God is the underlying ground of all 
things, so philosophy must confess with 
Scripture that in him we too live and move 
and have our being. But the characteristic 
of spiritual beings is, that, like their divine 
source, they are also for themselves. That 
is to say, they know themselves as one 
amid a multiplicity of states which they 



226 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



recognize as their own, and they know 
themselves as freely initiating action on a 
scene where all other actions are the de- 
termined issues of antecedent conditions. 
How beings can be self-contained persons 
and at the same time elements of the divine 
life, we can never perhaps precisely under- 
stand ; but the planets of the solar sj^stem 
and the cells in the living organism may 
serve as rude analogies for the visualizing 
imagination. At any rate, there is no es- 
cape from the difficulty unless we deny one 
side of the contrast. But the immanence 
of all that exists in God is a result of 
philosophical analysis that can lead to no 
other conclusion. And the fact of our own 
personality is an inexpugnable deliverance 
of consciousness. 

But these positions, be it observed, are 
not mutually contradictory. And, in fact, 
the main barriers to their union come al- 
together from the hard and fast delimita- 
tions of the popular understanding. If all 
things are in God, it is assumed that all 
things alike are without independence. Of 
course this is true to the extent that no 
finite things have originated their own 
existence, a point on which all are happily 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 227 

agreed. But it is false if it means that 
spiritual and material beings, because all 
included in the one absolute life, are all 
on the same plane of reality or unreality. 
The one kind has risen to a consciousness 
of self and of freedom ; the other has not. 
And whether they be in or out of the divine 
being, the difference between self and self- 
less stuff is the greatest we know or can 
imagine. Nor is there any reason why 
God should not manifest himself in and 
through degrees of reality, varying from 
zero to infinity. 

So much truth, at least, it seems to me 
to lie in the Hegelian contention that iden- 
tity and difference are both necessary to 
the being of the infinite spirit. But the 
difference above spoken of was rather a 
difference in the modes of its activity than 
a difference between those and the spirit 
itself. Hegel, however, - does not oppose 
man and God. And for my own part, I am 
unable to see how we can believe in God 
without at the same time regarding the 
finite spirit, so far as its essential ground 
is concerned, as identical, within the limits 
of its range, with the infinite spirit. It is 
so because it is an ego. Whatever is not 



228 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



an ego stands on a lower plane ; though ego 
and non-ego are both alike included in the 
divine life. But in the case of the ego, we 
have not merely a mode of the divine ac- 
tivity ; we have, as it were, a part of the 
divine essence. So that man's greater in- 
dependence is in fact the result of man's 
greater dependence upon God. God's love 
to man is already metaphysically prefigured 
in the gift of himself for the creation of 
man. Or, if we choose to express this 
spiritual relationship in the utterly inade- 
quate language of causality, we may say 
that while the infinite spirit is the first 
cause, finite spirits are the only second 
causes, — causes because they have the 
power of initiating action ; second causes 
because they derive it from the first cause, 
in relation to whom they are effects. The 
constituents of man's personality are of 
God, but they carry in their make and 
constitution the assurance that man does 
through their operations a portion of work 
which God has vacated on his behalf. As 
Dr. Martineau has expressed it: Man is 
included in what God has caused, though 
excepted from what he is causing ; so that 
while author of all our possibilities, God 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 229 

is not responsible for our actualities. But 
Dr. Martineau's reference to time is some- 
what misleading ; for it might be taken to 
imply that God had set up finite spirits 
and then left them to themselves. But the 
fact is, that God is ever present and active 
in us, so that our existence would collapse 
were he to withdraw. But the things lie 
causes are yet distinguishable from the 
things we cause, and that though in a last 
analysis our capacity of free initiation is 
also referable to the supreme cause. Man 
comes from God and is in God ; but what 
distinguishes him from selfless things is 
that he exists for himself and acts of him- 
self. 

The immanence of both the world and 
man in God is not, therefore, inconsistent 
with a belief in the insubstantiality of soul- 
less things and the free personality of the 
human spirit. But though our conception 
of God does not negate the self, it has not, 
so far as yet developed, provided for any 
special relation, as, for example, of affec- 
tion or communion between man and God. 
Derived from reflection upon the universe, 
the absolute was endowed with spirituality 
solely because nothing else was able to 



230 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



solve the cosmic problem. That is to say, 
if God was to be conceived merely as 
ground of all things, we found he must 
have the attributes of self-consciousness, 
power, and self-existence. Such a being is 
all that is needed by the metaphysician for 
the explanation of reality and its changes. 
Whether God is more than a self-conscious, 
active world-soul remains undecided ; and 
it can be determined only on the basis of 
certain special facts of which neither the 
metaphysician nor the scientist is required 
to take account. These are the ideals of 
the human heart. Voicing what ought to 
be, they present a striking contrast to what 
is. Yet if God is in truth the ultimate 
ground of all things, there must be in his 
nature a principle of union even of the 
ideal and the real. Yet it is just at this 
point that scepticism, and honest scepti- 
cism, too, has always intervened most ef- 
fectively to balk the aspirations of Chris- 
tian faith, which can stop at no conception 
of God short of that of Holy Father. Even 
David Hume acknowledged the force of 
the theistic argument till it reached its 
concluding demonstration of the moral na- 
ture of God. We shall, therefore, find it 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 231 

no easy task to establish the conviction 
that in the everlasting ground of things 
there is a heart of goodness that answers 
to the supreme ideals of the moral con- 
sciousness of mankind. Yet this is a mat- 
ter of the most vital concern to every one 
of us. For if God be not Love, the Chris- 
tian faith is vain. 

Nevertheless I would not emphasize this 
aspect of truth, to which we must soon re- 
turn, without mentioning another, which I 
am sure has been too much overlooked by 
theological thinkers. God has many attri- 
butes ; and though goodness is the one that 
affects most deeply the human heart, crea- 
tive power and wisdom are just as real 
and are much more manifest to the empiri- 
cal observer. It may, therefore, be quite 
misleading to say, as is often done, that a 
God without moral character is no God at 
all. As a matter of fact, the first gods, as 
was shown in an earlier lecture, were prob- 
ably non-moral beings. And even civilized 
peoples, like the Greeks and Romans, were 
wont in early times to trust in the gods, 
not because they were benevolent, but be- 
cause they had been properly propitiated. 
Of this sort is the faith of the modern 



232 



BELIEF IJST GOD. 



scientist. In his imagination and feelings 
he cannot realize the universe, but he looks 
upon it with awe and wonder and a deep 
sense of mystery. Now this attitude 
towards the universe is a worthy and ad- 
mirable one, and much more reverential 
than is too often found in those who have 
learned that the heart of things is also in- 
finitely good and loving. Though moral 
ideals may be the highest, we strive 
not only after goodness, but also after 
truth, beauty, and fulness of life. And 
whosoever finds in the universe the reali- 
zation of any one of his ideals will bow 
down and worship the eternal spirit that 
thus reveals itself to his soul. It matters 
not that we all see the Godhead from our 
own point of view. That is an inevitable 
consequence of our individuality. And it 
is surely no disparagement of any man's 
worship that it is awakened and exercised 
through the medium of that soul which 
God has given him. To the scientist God 
is the principle of order, to the artist the 
soul of beauty, to the man of virtue the 
will that is absolutely holy. In the Chris- 
tian church the anthropic view of God has 
always predominated over the cosmic ; and 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 233 

this has led to an undue disparagement of 
beauty and truth as compared with virtue. 
Art and science have been treated as secu- 
lar, if not positively irreligious. Now 
modern culture protests against the puri- 
tan enthronement of goodness above truth 
and beauty. It regards them as co-equal 
sister-graces, divine forms that haunt the 
mind of man and stimulate him to the real- 
ization of something absolutely worthful. 
For the decalogue it would substitute the 
wider new commandment of Goethe : Live 
resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in 
the Beautiful. We all want more life, and 
it is the yearning for it that leads us to 
practical religion ; that is, to communion 
with God. And what I understand Goethe 
to mean is that this fulness of life with 
God is best attained when we seek it 
in the knowledge of the universe, in the 
practice of moral disciplines, and in the 
admiration of every thing of beauty. This 
artistic aspect was especially conspicuous 
in the Greeks, whose religion was, as 
Hegel calls it, a religion of beauty. Of 
the remaining branches of Goethe's pre- 
cept, life in the Whole is the ideal of the 
scientist, life in the Good of the ordinary 



234 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



Christian. But the highest religion can 
be content with nothing short of the 
synthesis demanded by Goethe. And I 
expect it to emerge from the mutual 
attraction exercised upon each other by 
ecclesiastical Christianity and secular sci- 
ence. Religious thinkers will drop their 
exclusively anthropic idea of God. They 
will come to see that God is not merely 
the guarantee of those human hopes about 
which religion has in the past too exclu- 
sively turned, but also the sustaining 
ground of the universe, whose order is 
revealed by science. And scientific think- 
ers have already developed a natural the- 
ology, though in their zeal to destroy the 
old, they have almost lost sight of their 
own discovery. Has not the man of sci- 
ence an object of worship ? He calls it 
Nature rather than God ; but what's in a 
name? It is an object that inspires awe, 
and the scientist's most frequent complaint 
against popular Christianity is that it is 
too familiar with that Eternal Being be- 
fore whom prophets of old hid their faces 
in the dust. Again, Nature inspires con- 
fidence as well as terror. To the man who 
obeys her laws she gives peace and even 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 235 

Joy. As the priests of old knew how to 
win the favor of the gods, so the scientist 
understands how to gain the co-operation 
of Nature. If, in its revolt against tradi- 
tional Christianity, modern science has 
been forced to construct de novo a religion 
of its own, what it has attained is an ob- 
ject of worship resembling the God of Si- 
nai, though conceived altogether in terms 
of cosmic science. And as the anthropic 
theism of ecclesiastical Christianity is des- 
tined to take on also a cosmic character, it 
seems not rash to predict that the cosmic 
theism of secular science will complete 
itself by taking account of human ideals, 
and so go on to acid to the awe of Judaism 
the loving confidence of Christianity. In 
that event, the two theological tendencies 
of the day, the positive and negative (as 
generally regarded), would meet and coal- 
esce in anthropocosmic theism. And as 
neither the one nor the other would have 
any quarrel with art, but rather both de- 
mand it as a complementary grace, perfect 
religion would coincide with Goethe's ideal 
of perfect culture : Life in the Whole, the 
Good, and the Beautiful. 

But this prospect is not yet realized. 



236 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



And though the drift of thought tends 
thitherward, it is obstructed, perhaps defin- 
itively, by the scientist's inability to believe 
that the universe at heart is moral, or con- 
cerns itself in any way with the ideals of 
man. The relation of the universe to hu- 
man ideals is the question of questions for 
Christian theology. In a recent book en- 
titled Das Wesen der Religion, which has 
gone through several editions in Germany, 
but seems to be unknown in this country, 
Dr. Bender, of Bonn University, has very 
ingeniously attempted to show that all re- 
ligions, alike in their practical and their 
theoretical aspects, in their rituals and dog- 
mas, as well as in their revelations, take 
their origin and content from an effort to 
protect and realize the ends and ideals of 
life, be these ideals sensuous or spiritual, 
individual or universal, naturalistic, aes- 
thetic, or moral. According to Dr. Bender, 
the interests and aims of religion are the 
same as those of culture, though the mode 
of attaining them is different. In the one 
case, man is sufficient to himself ; in the 
other, not. But in both cases the impulse 
is the same, — the instinct that moves us 
to preserve, enrich, perfect, and beautify 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 237 



our own lives. Belief in God is merely 
an act of self-preservation in favor of our 
ideals. The central question of religion is 
not God, but man. The idea of God does 
not explain anything ; it simply calms our 
fears when our ideals seem unrealizable in 
the world. Prayer is the means by which 
man in the struggle for existence calls to 
his aid higher powers, in order to maintain 
his aims when his own power is insufficient. 
Thus the organizing principle of all relig- 
ions is the conception of an end or ideal 
of life and the belief in its realiz ability. 
From this source come all the supernatural 
beings of religion, the highest, of course, 
included. And the nature of these beings 
is also determined by the character of the 
ideals, in whose interest they have been 
originated. 

This is an anthropic theology with a ven- 
geance. The only proof of the existence 
of God is that man needs his help when 
the world bears hard on human ideals ! 
Of course, this is not Dr. Bender's own 
theistic argument. He comes before us, 
not as a metaphysician, but as a psycholo- 
gist whose aim is to trace the motives and 
processes that have led men everywhere to 



238 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



a conception and worship of the Godhead. 
That mankind has been under a great illu- 
sion both as regards the datum from which 
and the transcendent object to which the 
inference has been made, appears to be Dr. 
Bender's own personal view. And we have 
already seen that there is no purely an- 
thropic tenable argument for the existence 
of God. Where we take issue with Dr. 
Bender is in maintaining that there is a 
cosmic basis for our belief in God. And 
though religious thinking often ignores it, 
as our historical sketch made clear enough, 
it also at times gives it the fullest promi- 
nence. I question, therefore, the correct- 
ness of Dr. Bender's analyses, ingenious 
and fresh as they generally are. His book 
is another of the many brilliant volumes 
which have been written to explain how 
belief in God, considered as devoid of objec- 
tive foundation actually came into exist- 
ence. And though it might attract us by 
its exhaustive treatment of human ideals, 
we must leave it with the remark that it 
never raises the question which for us is 
all-important; namely, whether, as a mat- 
ter of fact, universal reality concerns itself 
about human ideals. 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 



239 



Students of German philosophy will rec- 
ognize in Dr. Bender's account of the psy- 
chological process of religion a universal 
application of Kant's moral argument for 
the existence of God. Certainly Kant's 
moral argument has more to recommend it 
than the illusory inferences which, accord- 
ing to Dr. Bender, mankind have made for 
the preservation of their interests and ends. 
For Kant, at any rate, believed in the abso- 
lute worth of the moral ideal. The mis- 
fortune, however, is that, instead of con- 
necting with that doctrine the existence of 
God, he took the roundabout and dubious 
course of connecting it with the propor- 
tioning of happiness to virtue, which he de- 
clared a requirement of the practical reason. 
But Kant's whole ethical system is in irrec- 
oncilable opposition to this euclsemonism. 
And what is still more fatal, introspection 
and reflection fail to convince us of the 
necessary connection between goodness and 
happiness. Yet unless virtue and rewards 
are to be adjusted, Kant has no function 
for the deity, and no other proof of his 
existence. 

The fact will have to be recognized 
sooner or later that there is no anthropic 



240 BELIEF IN GOD. 

proof of the existence of God. The moral 
ideal of man may throw some light upon 
the moral character of God, but it is power- 
less to prove the divine existence. More 
than this I cannot concede to Dr. Martineau, 
who maintains that conscience reveals to 
us God with the same directness and cer- 
tainty as sense-perception reveals an exter- 
nal world. The true state of the case 
seems rather to be that, though conscience 
does not prove the existence of one infinite 
spirit, it yet obliges us to invest it, if 
existent, with the predicate of righteous- 
ness. If there be a God, moral laws seem 
best explained as expressions of his nature. 
It is difficult, if not impossible, to think 
that the everlasting ground of things should 
be indifferent to those virtues and graces 
of character that constitute for us the 
chief end of man. 

Against this way of thinking Kant raised 
and emphasized the objection that moral 
law cannot be given to us from without. 
It must be imposed upon us by ourselves, 
since only such autonomous legislation is 
consistent with moral self-determination. 
This objection may be allowed as against 
the popular view that treats conscience as 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 241 

a supernatural and unique endowment of 
the human spirit, a foreign addition to its 
own proper make-up. If a human being 
could exist without a consciousness of 
right and wrong and a sense of the 
authority of the one over the other, its 
free life would, as Kant insisted, be turned 
into bondage by obedience to a moral law 
imposed by some external lawgiver. But 
such an hypothesis does not answer to the 
nature of man. Man has a moral constitu- 
tion, and, as Kant rightly saw, he imposes 
upon himself a law of unconditional obli- 
gation. Our problem begins where Kant's 
ends. How can we explain man's recog- 
nition of moral law apart from an innate 
endowment which is as distinctively char- 
acteristic of the human spirit as intelligence 
or will, and which, like these, must have 
its ground in the one infinite Spirit? It 
is not denied that the moral consciousness 
has its history, just like the intellect. And 
in the course of its development we can see 
its gradual purification and expansion. But 
though certain ethical institutions, like the 
family, for example, are differently regarded 
at different times and in various stages of 
civilization, the quintessence of morality is 



242 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



as clearly discernible amongst savages as 
amongst ourselves, and when due allowance 
is made for a society whose normal condi- 
tion is war, the difference either vanishes 
or remains such as is inevitable from the 
inequality of development in the intellec- 
tual faculties and in social organization. 
Now such a permanent and essential factor 
in man's make-up must have its ground in 
the eternal Spirit from which we derive 
our existence. God, therefore, is a God of 
righteousness. 

This conclusion, it must now be ad- 
mitted, is not inevitable for the man who 
can repudiate the absolute and self-attest- 
ing majesty of moral law. And various 
attempts have been made to explain it as 
an illusion incident to the circumstances 
of its origin. The most fashionable theory 
to-day is that mankind was moralized by 
fortuitous modes of conduct, among which 
the struggle for existence decided which 
was best. This theory of evolutionary 
morals is not so much false as incomplete. 
There can be little doubt that it was amid 
the warfare of life that man first awoke to 
a sense of the value of courage and all the 
sterner virtues, and even the gentler vir- 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 



243 



tues of honesty, truthfulness, fidelity, and 
compassion, may have been quickened by 
the same rude process. But the physical 
conditions under which any mental pro- 
duct (even a sensation) appears are a very 
different thing from the nature of that 
product itself, and they do not in the 
least touch the question of the innate con- 
stitution of the soul that enables it to make 
this response to those external stimulants. 
And what we have been maintaining is 
that our perception of right and wrong, 
and our recognition of the authority of 
the right, even if they have been quick- 
ened by natural selection, testify clearly 
to a moral capacity in the human spirit, 
which must have its ground in the one 
infinite Spirit. But should any one see in 
moral law merely a code of prudential max- 
ims that had forgotten their selfish utilities 
and taken themselves for absolute goods, 
he might retort that though morality had 
its root in the soul, it was merely a self- 
seeking root, whose native ugliness had 
been overlaid by the casual products of 
natural selection. If the moral ideal, which 
we have believed something absolutely 
worthful, were only a form of selfishness 



244 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



in disguise, it would of course cease to be 
an ideal for those who had seen into the 
illusion, and they would be left without 
any motive for postulating a moral charac- 
ter in God. In a last resort, our view of 
the moral character of God is conditioned 
by our interpretation of the moral nature 
and vocation of man. 

I am not, however, disposed to believe 
that our ethical schools differ as much in 
this interpretation as they themselves sup- 
pose. No school would to-day assert that 
the essence of goodness is selfishness. All 
schools agree that a large part, if not the 
whole, of goodness consists in what in its 
various degrees we name benevolence, love, 
or self-sacrifice. This is the fundamental 
principle of Christian ethics, whether we 
regard the life or the teaching of its founder. 
But that love is the fulfilling of the law is 
also the doctrine of John Stuart Mill, the 
classic expounder of utilitarianism. And 
though the utilitarian theory has been 
modified in many ways by an infusion of 
Darwinism, the " absolute ethics " of Mr. 
Herbert Spencer still has for goal the 
Golden Rule of Jesus of Nazareth. More 
than this ought never to have been claimed 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 245 

by the intuitional moralist. For all our 
moral codes and institutions are but em- 
pirical attempts to realize this transcendent 
ideal. That there is such a moral ideal no 
school denies, or can deny. But while the 
intuitional moralist has contented himself 
with the bald statement of the fact, his 
more scientific opponents have endeavored 
to discover the circumstances and processes 
of its realization. Some of their work has 
been valuable ; but as for the most part it 
lay outside the ken of history, it has been 
made up of arbitrary and dogmatic conjec- 
ture. But discarding all this surplusage, 
we find the schools of derivative morality 
agreeing with the intuitionist in the recog- 
nition of an absolutely worthf ul moral ideal, 
— an ideal that is an end in itself, never a 
means to anything else. And this ideal is 
described, subjectively, as universal benevo- 
lence or love ; objectively, as the well-being 
of mankind. 

Of this ideal human morality is the real- 
ization. It is this ideal that shapes the 
relations and institutions that bind us to 
one another and condition our appropria- 
tion of external objects. It would of course 
forever remain a blank in the mind, were 



246 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



there not a world of persons and things that 
presented material for its plastic operation. 
Bnt given these, it realizes itself through 
differentiation; that is to say, it takes as 
many forms as the material provides for. 
Thus in relation to the datum of sex, it 
yields the institution of marriage and the 
virtue of chastity. In relation to the datum 
of labor, it yields the institution of prop- 
erty and the virtue of justice. Of course 
with deeper insight into the essential con- 
tent of the ideal, we become dissatisfied 
with existent morality, and press forward 
to the mark of a higher calling. This is 
moral progress, which begins with indi- 
viduals, and ultimately embraces nations. 
Though slow, it has already made several 
revolutions in the history of the family; 
and if I rightly read the signs of the times, 
it seems likely in our own generation to 
change our views of property and justice. 

To come now to the application of this 
doctrine. I have maintained that though 
the basis of the theistic argument is cosmic, 
it is only our own self-conscious spirit that 
enables us to discover what the nature of 
the cosmic principle really is. But though 
an intelligent and volitional being would 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 247 

account for the phenomena of the material 
world, it would supply no ground for the 
moral ideal of man, which is as real as any 
other fact in the universe. We must not, 
therefore, hesitate to carry our " anthropo- 
morphism " so far as to conceive the Spirit 
of the universe as a God of love. It is 
true that this attribute of God is not so 
fully evidenced as the others. They are re- 
quired both for the interpretation of nature 
and of humanity ; this, only for the inter- 
pretation of the moral life of man. Still, 
it is highly improbable that the eter- 
nal Reality which has brought us forth, 
and charged us with the duty of loving 
one another, — so that love is the highest 
good and end in life, — should itself be a 
loveless Reality. And when we further 
remember that we have no experience of a 
Spirit in whom self-consciousness and will 
are divorced from goodness, we shall find 
ourselves obliged by sheer consistency, if 
we say, as we must say, that God is spirit, 
to acknowledge also that God is love. In- 
deed, did our metaphysics go far enough, 
it would have to confess that man has an 
ideal of goodness solely because the infinite 
spirit, of which the finite is a partial reve- 



248 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



lation, is the perfect realization of good- 
ness. I do not mean, of course, that God 
realizes in himself our differentiated moral- 
ity, — our ethical precepts, laws, and insti- 
tutions. For these have significance only 
for a finite spirit that has outside itself a 
world of co-equal spirits and of things, 
with which it holds external relations. 
But love, which is the underlying ground 
of all our morality, may be actualized in 
the divine nature. For love is precisely 
that which effaces distinction between our- 
selves and another. And God's love for man 
is the expression of his oneness with us. 
This oneness, however, was implied in our 
metaphysical theory of anthropocosmic the- 
ism, which is thus confirmed by the result 
of our ethical reflections. It only remains 
to add that if, as we acknowledged, man 
has communion with God through the 
avenues of the true and the beautiful, the 
deepest communion comes through the love 
that answers to our consciousness of God's 
love, since nothing else but love can abolish 
the distinction between its subject and its 
object. 

We cannot attribute goodness to the 
eternal ground of things without feeling 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 249 

painfully the contradictions of actual ex- 
perience. At the breath of sin and suffer- 
ing every theory of the universe grows 
sombre and unsteady. But that there is 
nevertheless a striving after a supreme end 
in the world is a belief we cannot be made 
to surrender. Good must in some way be 
the final cause of ill. Absolute evil — 
evil in itself, in its beginning, and in its 
issue — is an eternal devil we cannot brook 
to keep its state in the world. This is the 
motive to every theodicy. This is why 
we have a problem of evil, but no corre- 
sponding problem of good. Into such a 
deep subject we cannot plunge at the 
close of this series of lectures. But I may 
observe that as among lower animals the 
struggle for life has conduced to greater 
perfection, so men too are made perfect 
through suffering. And that not merely 
through chastening of character, which is 
a discipline that perhaps healthy men need 
as much as the sick, who, it must be ac- 
knowledged, sometimes miss it through ex- 
tremity of suffering. But suffering induces 
men to look for remedies. And these are 
to be found only through a knowledge of 
natural laws. Without human needs primi- 



250 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



tive man would not have undertaken the 
labor of investigation. And God, as ground 
of nature, would have remained unknown 
to mankind. In a very real sense, there- 
fore, God could not have revealed himself 
to the race without human suffering. And 
the end being attained, man is using his 
knowledge of nature for the elimination of 
suffering, which has already proceeded at 
such a rate that it is scarcely optimistic to 
forecast its ultimate disappearance. Mean- 
while the study of nature, to which need 
compelled mankind, will continue an end 
in itself. Even if we had a perfect science 
of medicine, the infinite complexity and 
immensity of nature would still be unex- 
plored. 

As suffering leads men to a knowledge 
of the cosmic manifestation of God, so also 
it is the indispensable condition of the 
emergence of sympathy and compassion in 
the heart of man. Without suffering and 
mutual needs there could be no human 
fellowship and love. The sociability of 
animals, which prefigures human love, is 
founded on the same basis. But as love is 
the cementing principle of human society, 
so it is love that unites us to God. It is 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 251 

through love, as Ave have seen, that the 
infinite spirit reveals itself in a very espe- 
cial way to the finite. Without some feel- 
ing of want, some suffering in a greater 
or less degree, man coulcl not receive this 
revelation of the heart of God. 

Nor is the problem of sin altogether 
insoluble from the point of view of the 
theism here advanced. At least we can 
understand how it originates and conjec- 
ture the function it subserves. That the 
possibility of sin is the correlative of the 
free initiative God has vacated on man's 
behalf is an old and not unsatisfactory ex- 
planation of its origin. Now the essence 
of sin, as mystics have always felt, is the 
enthronement of self. It is selfishness, 
self -isolation. Yet without such self-absorp- 
tion there could be no sense of union with 
God. For consciousness is possible only 
through opposition. To know A we must 
know it through not- A. Alienation from 
God is the necessary condition of com- 
munion with God. And this is the mean- 
ing of the scripture that where sin abounded 
grace shall much more abound. 

The movement of consciousness from the 
one pole to the other, or what Ave call con- 



252 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



version, may also be understood, in a meas- 
ure, from the standpoint of anthropocos- 
mic theism. The change is very properly 
described as a new birth. For that man 
is made a new creature who has come to 
see that God and not self is the centre of 
reality. Still it must not be forgotten 
that a natural birth is only the emergence 
into light of a reality that already existed 
in a definite fashion. So in the new birth 
the soul simply actualizes in its life and 
experience what was metaphysically po- 
tential before ; namely, its union with God. 
God and man were always one ; God was 
always love : the new birth consists in 
man's recognition and appropriation of this 
fact. 

The doctrine of the God-man is the nat- 
ural consequence of our theory of uni- 
versal being. God is the Father of spirits ; 
men are the children of God. That the 
sons of the divine Father should be dif- 
ferently endowed is a matter that presents 
no difficulty. The great spirits of the race 
are the standard-bearers of its civilization ; 
and we are all the richer for the artistic 
sense of Pheidias, the organizing power of 
Caesar, the poetic genius of Shakespeare, 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 253 

and the scientific intellect of Newton. 
Greater yet is our debt to those still higher 
spirits that have lived and died for the 
good. Nor among these choicest sons of 
the universal Father is there any meta- 
physical impropriety in supposing one to 
be in some pre-eminent sense the Son of 
God. I do not know, however, that any 
gain would come to our theology in de- 
scribing this unique personality as " very 
God," much less as "mere man." For it 
is a false metaphysic that separates God 
and man, and entangles itself with its own 
one-sided abstractions. Personality can- 
not be rendered in terms of any abstract 
system, without omitting its essence. We 
can be persons, and feel the influence of 
persons, but personality is something other 
than any definition of it. That men are 
now giving up the search for barren for- 
mulae to describe the Christ and insisting 
everywhere on the vitalizing power of his 
gracious personality, seems to me the most 
hopeful feature in the religious life of our 
day. Only in this way is it possible for 
the Son of Man to become the actual 
saviour of humanity. 

Of that life and immortality brought to 



254 



BELIEF IK GOD. 



light in the Gospel, our theistic theory- 
supplies the metaphysical basis. Because 
man lives in God here and now, he shall 
live with God in the kingdom where time 
and space are not. This is a metaphysical 
insight that carries us far beyond all the 
materialistic objections to existence after 
death. But even on that lower plane it 
may not be out of place to remark that 
though physical and psychical changes co- 
exist, we are still as far as ever from see- 
ing any necessary connection between them 
which might justify the belief that when 
the brain is out the man is dead. The 
difference between the ego and the brain 
is absolute. One is a thing, closely con- 
nected, it is true, with our life ; the other 
is a self that is conscious of its existence 
and opposes itself to mere things. This 
selfhood it is also that forbids us to merge 
at death the individual into the universal 
life. Pantheistic disparagement of person- 
ality runs counter to our experience of its 
existence, our conviction that it is the 
highest fact in the universe, and our re- 
flective insight into its indispensableness 
for the self-revelation of God, whom the 
pantheist mistakes for an infinite that ex- 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 255 

eludes the finite. Not only is the self an 
inexpugnable reality, but its capacity of 
knowing and loving being of larger scope 
than can be satisfied by the measure of 
our earthly life, its very make and func- 
tions carry with them the postulate of 
eternity. And this postulate is accredited 
by a theory that conceives death as a mere 
change in things, while the ego continues 
to live in the embrace of the absolute life. 
Because we are one with God, the ground 
of our communion can never be broken. 
And in the development of the religious 
consciousness, it was this lively sense of 
present communion with God that first led 
men to conceive of an eternal continuance 
of it hereafter. Such, at any rate, is the 
forceful and aspiring logic of the earlier 
Psalmists and the writer of the book of 
Job. So, also, was it with the assurance 
that nothing evil could happen to the good 
man, that Socrates, after rehearsing all 
other arguments against annihilation, com- 
posed himself for death. 

Of rewards and punishments which once 
played so prominent a part in natural 
theology, our metaphysical theory, strictly 
considered, has nothing to say. We have 



256 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



given reasons for our faith in an intelligent 
and moral ground of the universe, whose 
life makes human life divine and immortal, 
whose love is of such incalculable reach, 
that even sin and suffering must be the 
media of its revelation. That God is Love 
was the good tidings of the Gospel of 
Christ. And love is the fulfilling of the 
whole law. It is superfluous, therefore, to 
predicate any other moral attribute of God. 
Popular theology, however, insists that the 
Deity must also be described as just. And 
in this instance it receives powerful sup- 
port from Dr. Martineau, who contends 
that our moral nature compels us to con- 
ceive of God as invested with these three 
attributes : benevolence towards sentient 
beings ; justice towards moral beings who 
are under probation ; amity towards beings 
that have attained a moral harmony. In 
view of this contention, we must inquire 
what is meant by the justice of God, and 
especially its relation to the doctrine of 
rewards and punishments. 

In this inquiry it is important to bear in 
mind two facts. First, in early times jural 
and ethical notions were not distinguish- 
able. If in the course of ages they have, 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 257 

at least to a considerable extent, become 
differentiated, and taken on distinctive char- 
acteristics, their common source was un- 
written custom. It need not surprise us, 
therefore, to find that at the present day the 
moral continues to be confounded with the 
legal. The penalties by which laws are 
enforced are transferred from crimes to 
evils ; and the divine author of moral law 
becomes, like the earthly sovereign, a ter- 
ror to evil-doers. Secondly, the trium- 
phant faith in the love and goodness of 
God is, as we have shown in an earlier 
lecture, a late growth in the religious con- 
sciousness of mankind. It has not yet, 
even in Christendom, succeeded in dis- 
placing the older conception of the Deity 
as a God of wrath and terror. And a sort 
of compromise has silently established it- 
self between the ethical religion of Christ 
and the earlier legal religions, whereby the 
essential features of both, contradictory 
though they are, have been perpetuated. 
It is to this source, and not to the deliver- 
ances of the moral consciousness, that I 
refer Dr. Martineau's list of the divine at- 
tributes. Justice is a civic virtue which 
has too narrow a meaning to predicate of 



258 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



the Christian conception of God. Our 
courts of justice have too long furnished 
us with metaphorical descriptions of the 
divine government. From the primitive 
notion of the Deity as a judge or sovereign 
enforcing his arbitrary decrees, we must 
rise to the Christian thought of a loving 
Father bent on the education of the hu- 
man race. And from this higher point of 
view, if any place were left for a divine 
punitive function, it could have no other 
end than the well-being of the sufferer. 

It is to this higher standpoint that the 
moral and religious consciousness of our age 
is steadily advancing. To the economic 
and jural consciences of earlier genera- 
tions there seemed a necessary connection 
between virtues and rewards and between 
vices and punishments. The conventional 
penalties attached by legislatures to the 
violation of laws seemed to belong to the 
nature of things ; and God himself, to be 
just, was conceived as distributing felicity 
and suffering according to the deserts of 
the recipient. But it is no sense of justice 
that demands punishment for crime. The 
only possible justification for inflicting 
punishment upon a criminal is either the 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 259 

protection of society or the improvement 
of the criminal, or both ends combined. 
But the Omnipotent needs no protection 
against evil doers. Neither does he, any 
more than the perfect human father, have 
to resort to punishment for the education 
of his children. External punishment, 
therefore, is unthinkable for human sins. 
Nor can there be any external reward for 
human goodness, the very essence of which 
consists in being for its own sake. The 
hope of rewards would transform virtue 
into prudence. 

But the truth which this prudential and 
legal theory of external rewards and pun- 
ishments fails to express is clear enough 
when Ave take a more philosophic view of 
the human soul. If we neither personify 
nor localize spiritual conditions, it yet re- 
mains true that in the divinely established 
order of things, every act or thought leaves 
its impress on our character and makes us 
either more godlike or more carnal. This 
immanent natural causation popular the- 
ology takes for an external administration 
in another sphere of being. Here is the 
basis of those legal and penal ideas it 
associates with the future life. The truth, 



260 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



of course, is that heaven and hell, as they 
will be, have begun here and are in us now. 

" The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven/' 

Nothing requires us then to modify the 
conclusion already reached that love is the 
complete expression of the moral character 
of God. This also is the burden of the 
revelation through Christ as it is the one 
imperishable idea of every form of the 
Christian faith. I believe, therefore, that 
it is to the religion of Christ, as the abso- 
lute religion, that we shall find ourselves 
approximating, the deeper our soundings in 
the soul of man and of nature. But that 
religion is not to be confounded with any 
rigid and unprogressive creed that claims, 
in a formidable array of ancient articles, a 
monopoly of Christian truth. Not merely 
do we need, what Locke so earnestly de- 
manded, a broadening of the bottom of 
religion ; we need also a recognition of its 
constant progressiveness. For our knowl- 
edge of God must continue to grow with 
our knowledge of humanity and nature 
through which alone he reveals himself. 
The endless problem of religious thought 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 261 

will therefore be the resetting of the 
religion of Christ in the framework of 
contemporary knowledge. When this is 
wanting, there arises a warfare, not indeed 
as the vulgar suppose of science with re- 
ligion, but of later science with earlier 
science in terms of which religion is still 
expressed. Modern science is not antag- 
onistic to the religion of Christ, but it is 
fatal to those confessions of the Christian 
religion which have been embodied in an 
antiquated psychology, anthropology, cos- 
mology, and history. The process of re- 
adjustment is going on rapidly, and it is 
much more thorough in the actual beliefs 
of men than in the revised creeds that are 
supposed to represent them. Even the 
new biblical criticism has won a victory 
almost as complete as that of astronomy, 
geology, and zoology. The sober and 
cautious spirit of modern culture has once 
for all domiciled itself in the realm of 
theology also. 

It is perhaps on the subject of miracles 
that the readjustment is slowest and most 
difficult. Nor is this astonishing, since, as 
Goethe put it, 



262 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind. 1 

Both the metaphysical possibility and the 
historical evidence of miracles have been 
canvassed with a great array of learning 
and philosophy. The a priori arguments 
are pretty nearly what they were in the 
time of Hume. But the problem has 
taken on a new complexion from the ad- 
vance in critical and historical scholarship. 
Miracles can be accounted for, — at least, 
in the belief of those who describe them. 
And whether they actually happened or 
not is a question that is left to answer it- 
self. It is, however, on the answer to this 
question, that many religious minds sup- 
pose their faith to depend. And on this 
point I will venture a couple of observa- 
tions. The first is that whatever may be 
the final word regarding miraculous hap- 
penings in the realm of nature, every hu- 
man soul in the present condition of our 
knowledge is a miracle — a miracle which 
is especially conspicuous in the great 
geniuses of our race. Such a miracle was 
the founder of Christianity whose marvel- 
lous personality still works wonders on the 

1 The Miracle is dearest Child of Faith. 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 263 

souls of men. This is a fact of actual ex- 
perience which every inquirer may verify 
for himself. And as it is not supported, 
neither is it invalidated by any views that 
may be entertained regarding a unique 
power exercised over nature two thousand 
years ago. My second observation is that 
in considering miracles we must always 
distinguish between the picture or symbol 
and the thing signified. For example, 
most religions, including the Christian, 
tell of the miraculous ascension of their 
founders to heaven. Now the thought 
which it is here attempted to picture before 
the eyes, is that the souls of the good, 
untouched by death, live eternally with 
God. With this thought philosophy and 
theology have alike made us familiar. 
And we are able to realize it without the 
aid of the visualizing imagination. But 
to the average Jew and Greek of the first 
Christian century, whose conception of the 
hereafter was that of a shadowy existence 
in the underworld of sheol or hades, the 
Christian doctrine of an actual and eternal 
life with God was novel, startling, and al- 
together unrealizable in abstract thought. 
But what understanding could not coji- 



264 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



ceive, imagination could symbolize in pic- 
tures of cosmic space. It is in fact a law of 
religious history that vision always comes 
to the aid of faith. And up to the time 
of the Copernican astronomy the visual 
picture of a flight above the stars served 
to realize and verify the belief in continued 
life with God. But in the restless march 
of mind, the aids of one generation become 
the obstacles of the next. And our helio- 
centric astronomy, with its conception of il- 
limitable space and infinite worlds, with its 
derealization of heaven and decentraliza- 
tion of earth, has made the once expressive 
picture of an ascension through the clouds 
altogether meaningless. The abstract doc- 
trine of immortality has itself become 
perfectly intelligible to us. The symbol 
which once interpreted it now only ob- 
scures it. Meantime popular theology has 
taken the symbol for the substance. It is 
concerned to prove that the Christ actually 
disappeared in the upper air from the 
vision of his disciples. It ignores the one 
important question, what was the meaning 
or intention of this flight even if we sup- 
pose it to have taken place. To pre-Co- 
pernican thought it meant of course an 



AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 265 

ascent to heaven. But in our theory of 
the universe it can have no such signifi- 
cance. It is in fact an obsolete picture of 
an eternal truth. That truth is the fact 
of continued life with God, uninterrupted 
even by death. Here is the real mystery, 
the miracle of miracles, in whose naked 
presence all symbols vanish away. 

From symbol to essence, from picture to 
reality, from myth to fact, from the Chris- 
tian religion to the religion of Christ : 
such is the movement which under the in- 
fluence of scientific criticism is reshaping 
the theology of our day. The goal is no 
longer dogmas about the Messiah, but the 
actual content of the revelation made in 
and through the historic Christ. This, it 
is felt, is the imperishable essence of every 
form of Christianity. Now, though it is no 
doubt difficult to describe adequately a 
religion that was embodied in a personality, 
it will be admitted that the main constitu- 
ent of the religion of Christ was a sense 
of filial relation to God conceived as uni- 
versal Spirit and Father. The examina- 
tion we have undertaken of the grounds 
for belief in God seemed, therefore, to 
be demanded by the movement and ten- 



266 



BELIEF IN GOD. 



dency of contemporary Christian theology. 
What its value may be as a contribution 
to the question at issue, must be left to 
others to determine. But for my own part 
I think it has been shown that the phe- 
nomena both of the universe and of human 
life require the thinking mind to postulate 
a Supreme Ground of things which we are 
entitled to describe as self-conscious Spirit 
and loving Father. 



Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston. 



Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



